In a niche like VPN, every SEO team eventually gets the same email: a spreadsheet of “high DA/DR sites”, a price list and a promise of fast results. Some of those vendors are excellent. Many are reselling the same farm sites to everyone who will pay. The difference rarely shows in the pitch — but it almost always shows in a few quick checks.

Here are the twelve warning signs we see most often, grouped by where you’ll spot them.

Red flags in the site list

1. Authority without traffic

A site with a Domain Rating of 70 and a few hundred organic visits a month is not a strong site. It is a site with a strong-looking number. Authority metrics can be inflated by pointing links at a domain; traffic is much harder to fake. Check: put the domain into Ahrefs or a similar tool and look at the organic traffic chart, not just the headline metric.

2. A list with no traffic or country columns

If a vendor only shows DR or DA, they are either hiding something or not looking. A VPN link from a site whose readers live in the wrong country does very little for you. Check: ask for organic traffic and the top countries by share for every site. A good vendor already has them.

3. Hundreds of sites, every niche, same price band

A list of 800 sites covering pets, crypto, wedding dresses and VPNs is a reseller inventory, not a curated list. Real outreach produces fewer, more relevant sites. Check: sort the list by topic. If most sites have nothing to do with your product, keep looking.

4. Domains hidden until you pay

Some vendors mask domains to stop buyers going direct. That’s understandable for a first look, but you should see full domains before you approve anything specific. Check: ask whether you approve each site with its full domain before the order is placed.

Red flags on the sites

5. Casino, pharma and payday-loan neighbours

Outbound links to gambling, pharmacy or quick-loan pages are the clearest sign a site sells to anyone. Your link would sit in that neighbourhood. Check: look at the site’s outgoing links report, or simply open its five most recent articles.

6. “Write for us” as a business model

A prominent “write for us” or “sponsored post” page with a public price list means the site exists to sell placements. Search engines see the same pattern you do. Check: search the domain for “write for us”, “guest post” and “sponsored post”.

7. Topics that change every day

A real publication has a beat. A link farm publishes whatever was paid for this morning: recipes, then crypto loans, then VPN reviews. Check: scroll the archive. If you can’t say what the site is about in one sentence, neither can Google.

8. No named authors, no history

Real sites have editors and writers with names and track records. Farms have “admin” and a wall of articles from the last six months. Check: look for author pages and an archive older than a year or two.

9. A sudden spike in authority

If a site’s referring domains or DR jumped sharply in a few weeks, someone probably bought links to pump it. Check: look at the referring domains history. Steady growth is normal; a cliff is not.

Red flags in the process

10. No approval step

If you can’t approve each site — and, for guest posts, the draft — before it goes live, you’re trusting the vendor with your domain’s link profile. Check: ask exactly what you approve and when.

11. Vague guarantees

“Lifetime guarantee” means little if nobody defines what triggers a replacement. Check: ask what happens if the link is removed, changed to nofollow, or the page is deleted or noindexed — and for how long.

12. Nobody owns the relationship with the site

Many vendors buy from brokers who buy from other brokers. When a link disappears, nobody can get it back. Check: ask whether the vendor deals with the site owner or editor directly. Then ask who you call when something goes wrong.

The five-minute checklist

Before you approve any site, run through these:

  1. Organic traffic is real and not collapsing over the last 12 months.
  2. A meaningful share of that traffic comes from your target countries.
  3. The last ten articles are on topics where your link makes sense.
  4. No casino, pharma, adult or loan links in recent posts.
  5. Named authors, a real archive, no “write for us” price list.
  6. You know who at the site agreed to the placement.

None of these checks needs special access, and together they catch the large majority of bad placements. They are also, not coincidentally, the six checks of the Miran Gate — we run them on every site before it can reach a client’s list, and we publish the thresholds so you can check our work.

Want to see what a vendor list should look like? Open our sample site list, read how our 12-month replacement guarantee works, or get a free vetted site list for your brief — whether you need VPN link building or cybersecurity link building.