Quality control in link building is mostly a matter of writing the standard down. An unwritten standard drifts, particularly in the third week of a month when delivery is behind. A written one has to be explicitly overridden, which is a different and much rarer act.
Nine checks. Six run before outreach; three run after publication. All nine must pass.
Pre-outreach — six checks on the candidate
1. Verified organic traffic
Threshold: ≥1,000 monthly organic sessions, verified in a third-party index rather than reported by the publisher.
Documented exception: tight-niche publications where the total addressable readership is genuinely small and demonstrably the right audience. The exception must be recorded with a reason, not applied silently.
2. Topical overlap
Threshold: ≥0.60, scored on the publication's existing output rather than on its willingness to accept your topic.
Sample thirty recent articles and classify. The distinction that matters: does this publication cover your category, or is it willing to cover anything?
3. Publishing history
Threshold: demonstrable coverage of the topic predating our contact.
Rules out sites spun up to sell placements and sites that pivoted into a lucrative category recently. Check the archive; check the Wayback Machine if the domain is older than its current content suggests.
4. Editorial identity
Threshold: named author with an external footprint, and a contactable editor.
An anonymous "admin" byline is a footprint you inherit. A named author who exists nowhere else on the internet is the same thing with extra steps.
5. Footprint clustering
Threshold: no shared hosting range, template, plugin signature or outbound pattern with other inventory in the same list.
Run this across the whole month's candidate set rather than per domain. Clustering is only visible in comparison, which is why per-link vetting misses it.
6. Outbound hygiene
Threshold: no outbound links to gambling, adult, essay-writing or unrelated high-risk commercial categories.
Where else a site links describes who it will accept money from. You inherit that company.
Post-publication — three checks on the placement
7. Placement context
Threshold: contextual, in-body, inside the argument.
Apply the deletion test — remove the sentence containing the link and ask whether the article got worse. Author bios, footers, sidebars and sponsor blocks fail.
8. Attribute and destination
Threshold: follow unless otherwise agreed, pointing at the specified URL, with the anchor from the agreed distribution plan.
Three separate failures live here: a quiet rel="sponsored" substitution, a link to the homepage instead of the target page, and an anchor that was chosen in the moment rather than from the plan.
9. Indexation
Threshold: page indexed, confirmed at publication and again at day 30.
An unindexed page passes nothing. Not indexed by day 30 means not billable — which puts host quality on the supplier's side of the ledger rather than the client's.
The copy-and-paste version
Send this to any supplier and ask which of the nine they run, and what their thresholds are.
1. verified organic traffic ≥ ____ /mo, source: ____
2. topical overlap ≥ ____, scored on: ____
3. topic history predates contact: y/n
4. named author + contactable editor: y/n
5. footprint clustering checked across candidate set: y/n
6. outbound hygiene checked: y/n
7. contextual in-body placement: y/n
8. rel attribute + destination + planned anchor verified: y/n
9. indexation confirmed at publication and day 30: y/n
What a real QA process produces
Two artefacts, and the second is the one that matters.
The verification record — one row per shipped placement, carrying the evidence for checks 7, 8 and 9 plus the traffic figure from check 1.
The rejection log — one row per candidate that failed, with the check number it failed on. This is the more informative document, because it shows where the bar sits rather than what got over it.
Roughly two thirds of everything we prospect fails one of checks 1 to 6. If that number ever dropped sharply in a month where delivery was behind, it would mean the checklist had stopped being a checklist.
Running it on someone else's work
You cannot run checks 1 to 6 retrospectively in full — the candidate set is gone. You can run 7, 8 and 9 on anything delivered, and you can run 1, 2, 4 and 6 on the domains that shipped.
Take twenty live placements from the last quarter and score them. Expect roughly 16+ to pass on traffic, 18+ to have a real named author, 15+ to be contextual in-body, and all 20 to be indexed. Materially below that, ask about the gap — the answer may be reasonable, and you want it before the next renewal rather than after.
Where checklists fail
Three failure modes worth naming, because a checklist that is not maintained is worse than none.
Thresholds that are never enforced. A published minimum that gets waived every month is decoration. The waiver should require a written reason in the log.
Checks that cannot be evidenced. "We assess relevance" is not a check. A check has a threshold, a method and an artefact.
No cross-candidate view. Check 5 only works when the whole month's set is compared. Per-link vetting is structurally blind to the single most conclusive signal available.