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The StarkSEO
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Free tool

Before you pay for that link, check the site

Someone is offering you a guest post for a few hundred dollars. Paste their domain here and you will know in ten seconds whether it is a real publication or a site that sells links to anyone. Free, no signup, and it shows you the evidence rather than just a score.

Checks run
7
Free per person
3
Sites we already vetted
410
Cost
Nothing

The problem

Someone offers you a guest post on a DR 60 site for $300. The metrics look good. But DR is trivially inflated, and half the sites selling links are quietly selling to everyone, which is how a client site ends up in bad company.

What people normally do

Open five articles and count the outbound links. Check whether last month's posts are on the same subject as this month's. Look at whether their own backlinks arrived steadily or all in one suspicious month. It takes about twenty minutes per site, so most people skip it.

What this does

All of it, in about ten seconds. You type a domain, we read their pages and their link profile, and you get a plain answer with the evidence behind it — plus whatever we could not work out, said so.

What you get back

An example, using a site that failed. Every row says what we looked at, what we found, and why it matters.

example-publisher.com

We would not buy here

Two things are wrong: the articles are full of paid links, and the domain rating is not backed by any real search traffic.

  • Is it stuffed with paid links?Problem

    Around 9.4 paid-looking links in every article. This site sells links for a living.

  • Is its DR real?Problem

    DR 61, but it only ranks for 43 keywords. The authority is a number, not an audience.

  • Is anyone still running it?Fine

    Publishing actively — 22 posts in the last 90 days.

Illustration, not a real domain. A live report shows all seven checks with the numbers behind each one.

Check a site

Any domain someone has offered you a link on. It takes about ten seconds because we actually go and read their pages.

3 of 3 free checks left. Takes about ten seconds — we read a few of their pages rather than guessing.

Where this came from

These are the checks we run before a site goes on our own marketplace. We have done it by hand four hundred-odd times and rejected roughly two thirds of what we looked at, so the thresholds come from actually buying links rather than from a blog post about buying links.

There are plenty of checklists telling you to do this. There was not, as far as we could find, anything that just did it. So we opened ours up.

What it cannot tell you

Whether the writing is any good. Whether their audience is in your client's country. Whether the editor will actually accept your pitch. Whether a competitor already has three links there. Those need a person, and the report says so at the bottom rather than pretending otherwise.

It also cannot see everything. Where a data source is unavailable the report marks that check as unchecked and removes it from the score. A tool that quietly scores a missing check as a pass is worse than no tool, because you would trust it.

We have already done this 410 times

Every site on our marketplace went through these checks by hand before it was listed. Roughly two thirds of what we assess does not make it.

See the 410 that passed

About this tool

Seven things: how many followed external links sit in their articles, whether recent posts share a subject, whether they are still publishing, whether they solicit paid posts, how their outbound volume compares to the domains linking to them, whether their own backlinks arrived in suspicious spikes, and whether their authority is matched by real rankings.
Because we could not get the data, and saying so is more useful than guessing. Unchecked signals are excluded from the score rather than counted as passes — if too many are missing we return no verdict at all instead of a confident-looking number built on half the evidence.
No. We read the home page, a feed or sitemap, and up to four articles, one request at a time with a gap between them. We check robots.txt first and do not proceed if it asks us not to.
No. It means we would not place a client link there on this evidence, and the report tells you exactly which signal caused it so you can disagree. Some perfectly good publications will fail a check for reasons that do not matter in your niche.
Each one costs us real money in data lookups and a few requests to someone else's server. Three is enough to see whether the tool is any good. After that a free partner account makes it unlimited.
We cache the result by domain for 30 days so repeat lookups are instant and cost nothing. We do not store who checked what — the free-tier counter is a one-way hash, not a record of you.

Or skip the checking

Every one of the 410 sites on our marketplace has been through this already, with a price next to it and nothing to pay until a link is live.

Open the marketplace