The numbers we hold a link to, published, so you can hold us to them.
Most agencies describe link quality in vague terms. We publish our actual thresholds, the tools that measure them, and how often we report on them.
Ask us to audit your current links-
Link criteria
Domain Authority 30 or above Spam score under 11 Indexed, relevant, with a real audience
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The tool stack
Five paid platforms, named Plus your own Search Console and GA4 Configured in the first 30 to 45 days
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Content standards
Guest posts at 500+ words Blog articles at 800+ words Written for a publication that can reject them
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Reporting rhythm
A weekly tactical huddle A monthly KPI review A quarterly strategic deep-dive
Link acquisition criteria
What a link has to clear before we place it
Six checks, every one of them verifiable from the report we send you. A domain has to pass all six, not four out of six.
These are minimums, not averages. If a domain fails one check it does not get placed, and we would rather deliver fewer links in a month than explain a bad one later.
The stack
What the numbers are measured with
Five paid platforms plus your own data. Named, because the tool a claim was measured with is part of the claim, and because you can ask to see the same screen we are looking at.
Sitebulb — crawling and technical audits
Every technical audit on this site runs through it: URL structure, indexation, canonicals, redirect chains, response codes and structured data, with the issues ranked by what they actually cost.
Semrush — keywords, competitors and gaps
Keyword research and mapping, competitor visibility, and the content gap analysis that decides what gets written before anything gets written.
Ahrefs — backlinks and competitor link profiles
Where the link opportunities come from, and where we check what a competitor did that we have not. Also the second opinion on any domain a client questions.
Advanced Web Ranking — rank tracking
Daily positions per market and per device, so a monthly report is built from tracked data rather than a spot check taken on the day it was written.
Moz Pro — link quality and spam detox
The source of the spam score in our criteria, and the tool behind the monthly detox pass across the whole profile.
Your own data — Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4
Configured in the first 30 to 45 days, on your accounts, not ours. When the engagement ends, the history stays with you.
Move across the pack to read each one.
Want your current link profile checked against these?
We will run your backlinks through the same six checks and send you the list that fails.
No obligation, reply within 24h.Questions about how we qualify a link
No. Domain Authority is Moz’s estimate and Domain Rating is Ahrefs’, both modelled from link graphs those companies crawl themselves. Google does not publish a public authority score and does not use theirs. We use DA as a filter because it is a reasonable proxy and it is checkable by you, not because Google reads it.
A competitor can copy the numbers into a deck in about a minute. What they cannot copy is being held to them. The value of publishing is that it gives you something to check, and it gives you a standard to measure other proposals against. If a quote will not commit to a threshold in writing, that is the useful question to ask before signing.
It gets caught in the monthly spam analysis, which covers the whole profile rather than only the links we placed. Sites decay: a legitimate publication two years ago can be a link farm today. Where the link cannot be removed at source it goes into a disavow file, and you get the record of what was disavowed and why.
The five paid platforms are the same, because consistency is what makes month-on-month numbers comparable. What changes is which of your own properties they are pointed at, and whether the market needs an additional local data source. If we ever add a tool mid-engagement we say so and explain what it is answering that the existing stack could not.
Yes, and guest posts carry the extra content standard on top: 500 words minimum, written for a publication with editors who could turn it down. A guest post on a site that publishes anything fails the editorial check regardless of its Domain Authority.
