HowIVetaSiteBeforePitching

Vetting is the part of this job that clients see least and pay for most. What follows is the actual sequence, ordered by cost — the cheap disqualifiers run first so that expensive judgement is only ever spent on sites that might survive it.

Last publication date. If nothing has gone up in ninety days the site is either dormant or between editors, and both mean the pitch goes nowhere. Free to check and it removes a surprising share of any list.

The last twenty URLs, organic keywords per URL, median rather than mean. A median of zero is a hard stop regardless of what the domain-level figures say. This is where most of the list dies, and it should be.

Count external commercial links on the five most recent posts. A publication that cites sources will have some. A site monetising placements will have a consistent, unmistakable pattern of them, usually anchored on exact-match commercial phrases.

Author pages, and whether the names recur. A masthead of one-time contributors with stock-photo avatars is a marketplace. Three or four recurring writers with histories elsewhere is a publication.

Pull the category list. Sites that cover four unrelated commercial verticals are not covering them, they are renting space in each. This is the check that most reliably predicts a placement quietly losing its value a year later.

Only now does anything expensive happen. I read two posts end to end and ask one question: would I send this to a client as evidence of something? If the answer is no, the site does not go on the list regardless of what its metrics look like.

Five checks are arithmetic. The sixth is the one that is hard to outsource, and it is the one that decides.

Across twelve months this sequence puts roughly one site in nine onto an active pitch list. That ratio has been remarkably stable, and it is the single most useful planning number I have.