Publisher vetting is the highest-leverage skill in link acquisition, and it is mostly unglamorous work. Begin with traffic distribution rather than traffic volume: a healthy site earns visits across hundreds of pages, not three viral posts from 2019.
Next, look at the outbound pattern. Sites that publish twelve sponsored posts per week across unrelated industries are optimising for volume, not readership. Check whether commercial content is disclosed, whether authors have verifiable bylines, and whether the editorial calendar has continuity.
Finally, examine relevance from the reader's perspective. If a reasonable person browsing that site would find your page useful, the placement is doing its job. If the only connection is a keyword, you are paying for a footprint rather than an endorsement.
We apply a version of this checklist to every domain in the marketplace, and we re-run it quarterly because sites change hands more often than most buyers assume.
Put this into practice
Run an Link Gap Scout analysis on one of your commercial pages, then compare the content gaps against your current roadmap.