Free tool
Paste up to 50 supplier domains, one per line. The check returns HTTP status, indexability, language, and outbound link count for each, which is enough to cut most prospect lists in half before a human looks at them.
Definition
Supplier domain qualification is the process of deciding, against a written bar, whether a domain is worth spending outreach effort on. It runs in two passes for a good reason. The mechanical pass is cheap and automatable: does the site resolve, is it indexable, what language is it in, how many outbound links does it carry, is it still publishing. The judgment pass is expensive and human: is the content real, would you be comfortable telling a client your link is here, does the site have an audience. Running the cheap pass first is what makes the expensive pass affordable.
01
Prospect versus supplier
A prospect is an unqualified domain. It becomes a supplier only after it clears your bar, and the distinction keeps pipeline numbers honest.
02
Pass one, mechanical
Status, indexability, language, publishing recency, and outbound link ratio. Fast, cheap, and catches most rejections.
03
Pass two, judgment
Content quality, author credibility, audience reality, and niche fit. Slow, human, and only worth doing on survivors.
04
Pass three, optional
Authority, traffic, and referring domain enrichment. Costs credits, so it goes last rather than first.
The filters
Most prospect lists are largely unusable, and the majority of rejections can be made by a machine in two seconds. Running these in order saves the most time for the least effort.
Does the domain resolve at all. A surprising share of any exported or scraped list is parked domains, expired registrations, and sites that no longer answer. This costs nothing to check and removes rows before anything else has to look at them.
If I could keep only one filter, it would be outbound links per page. Editorial pages link out a few times. Link shops link out constantly.
Does the page return a genuine 200. Watch for soft 404s, meaning pages that return a success code while displaying a not found message, and for holding pages dressed up as content. A status code alone is not proof of a real page, which is why presence of actual content matters alongside it.
Is the site indexable. A sitewide noindex, or a robots configuration that blocks crawling of the sections where links would sit, makes any placement worthless from a ranking perspective. Rare but catastrophic when missed, since the link looks perfect to a human reviewer.
Does the language match your market. Cheap to detect and easy to skip when you are moving fast. A high authority link on a site your customers cannot read sends no useful traffic and carries a weak relevance signal.
Is the site still alive editorially. Check whether anything has been published in the last few months. A site that stopped publishing in 2021 may still have authority on paper, but its pages are drifting out of relevance, its audience has gone, and nobody is going to answer your email anyway.
How many outbound links per page. This is the filter I would keep if I could only keep one. Editorial pages link out a handful of times because that is what serving a reader looks like. Pages built to monetize links carry dozens or hundreds. The ratio of external to internal links tells the same story from another angle.
Only now does enrichment make sense. Authority scores, traffic estimates, and referring domain counts all cost credits or rate limit, and the whole point of the sequence above is that you are spending them on a list that has already been cut down to plausible candidates rather than on raw export rows.
Reading the signals
The uncomfortable fact about domain authority metrics is that they are computed from backlink profiles, and backlink profiles are the one thing a link seller is guaranteed to be good at building. So the metric most teams use as their primary quality filter is precisely the metric most easily manufactured by the sites you are trying to avoid.
The tell is the mismatch between authority and traffic. A domain with a strong authority score and almost no organic traffic has backlinks that are not producing rankings, which usually means the backlinks are not real endorsements. That gap between the two numbers is more informative than either number alone, and it takes one extra column to spot.
Content is the other place the truth shows. Read two articles properly rather than skimming ten. Real publications have a voice, an editorial angle, and topics that stay within a recognizable remit. Networks have competent, flat, keyword-shaped prose covering whatever topics people are paying to place links about, which is why you find cryptocurrency, dentistry, and casino content sharing a byline.
Then look at the authors. Named writers with a presence elsewhere on the web are a strong positive signal, and it is one of the harder things to fake at scale. An admin byline, or an author page with a stock photograph and a two line biography that appears verbatim on other sites, points the other way.
None of this requires a sophisticated scoring model. It requires a written bar, applied consistently, with rejection treated as a normal outcome. The teams that get into trouble are not the ones with weak filters, they are the ones whose filters bend whenever somebody is behind on a monthly link target.
Cluster signals for a link network
Workflow
One session, done in this order, and the ruthlessness in step three is the point rather than a side effect.
Check the list against domains you have contacted before, including rejections. Recycled prospect lists are common, and re-pitching a domain you rejected last year wastes time twice: once now, and once again when somebody has to work out why the record already exists.
Status, indexability, language, publishing recency, and outbound link ratio in one pass. This typically removes a large share of a raw list and requires no human judgment at all.
The instinct is to keep borderline domains because the list is getting short. Resist it. Reply rate is a function of fit, so a shorter well-qualified list produces more links than a long unfiltered one, and it produces them with less wasted outreach.
Two articles, properly, on each remaining domain. This is the expensive step, which is exactly why it comes fifth rather than first. You are checking whether a real person writes for a real audience.
Now spend the credits. Authority, traffic, and referring domains on the domains that survived, so your API budget goes to candidates rather than to rows you were always going to reject.
A one line reason on every rejection. It feels like bureaucracy and it pays for itself the first time a teammate considers the same domain, or the first time the same list arrives from a different vendor.
Signals
Each of these is cheap. Together they do most of the work of qualification.
Removes parked domains, dead sites, and soft 404s. The cheapest filter and usually the first meaningful cut in any raw list.
Catches sitewide noindex and blocked sections. Rare, and it makes a placement worthless while looking completely normal.
The strongest cheap signal for link farms and paid only networks. Editorial pages link out sparingly.
Filters out sites your customers cannot read. Worth treating as a hard filter for most businesses rather than a judgment call.
Identifies abandoned sites that still carry authority on paper but have no audience and nobody answering email.
Strong score with no organic traffic suggests a manufactured backlink profile. The most useful comparison in prospecting.
The risk side
Quality filtering is usually framed as efficiency, as though the only cost of a poor domain were wasted outreach. The bigger cost is what a bad placement does to the client whose name is on it.
A link from an obvious link network does not just fail to help, and Google's own policy names the pattern. It associates a client's domain with a pattern that search engines have spent years learning to identify, and it does so in a way that is difficult to unwind later. Disavowal is available, it is slow, and it is a worse position to be in than never having built the link.
There is also a straightforwardly commercial risk that gets discussed less. Marketing leadership occasionally discovers their brand linked from a site they find embarrassing, and the conversation that follows is not about SEO. Gambling, adult content, and low grade content mills all carry authority scores that look fine in a spreadsheet, and none of them are somewhere a brand manager wants to see their company mentioned.
This is why we would push any team toward a written bar rather than case by case judgment, applied at the scale a real prospect list arrives in. Written standards survive deadline pressure. A rule saying no domains with more than 100 outbound links per page holds when somebody is three links short of a monthly target, whereas a general commitment to quality does not, and everyone involved knows it does not.
The corollary is that rejection needs to be a normal, unremarkable outcome. If your process treats a rejected domain as wasted work, the pressure runs toward accepting marginal sites. If it treats rejection as the expected result for most prospects, which it is, then your standards hold and your reply rate improves at the same time.
Terminology
Definitions used throughout this page and in the app's supplier records.
Questions
50 domains per check, no API key needed. Inside the app the same checks run across much larger lists with optional authority, traffic, and referring domain enrichment. Fifty is a deliberate limit rather than an arbitrary one: it is about the size of a single prospecting session's shortlist.
It is the cheapest reliable signal for separating real publishers from link farms. A page carrying 200 or more external links is almost never an editorial page, whatever its authority score says. Genuine articles link out a handful of times. Pages built to sell links link out constantly, and no amount of domain authority changes what that pattern means.
No, and treating it that way is the most expensive mistake in prospecting. Authority scores are computed from backlink profiles, and backlink profiles can be manufactured. A DR60 domain with 400 outbound links per page, no organic traffic, and a priced write for us page is a link seller with a good backlink profile, not a good publisher.
Everything mechanical: does the domain resolve, does the page return a real 200, is the site indexable, does the language match your market, has it published anything recently, and how many outbound links per page. Enrichment costs money and rate limit, so spending it on a list you have not filtered is how teams burn an API budget on domains they were always going to reject.
Look for clusters of signals rather than any single one. Thin or spun content, no named authors or authors with no footprint anywhere else, a generic template shared with other sites in your list, no real traffic despite a high authority score, topics that wander across unrelated niches, and a footer full of outbound links. One of those is noise. Four together is a network.
Not automatically, no. Plenty of legitimate publications accept contributions and say so. The signal to watch is pricing: a page that lists placement costs by authority tier is running a link shop, and the editorial framing is decoration. A page inviting pitches with no price attached is usually a real publication with a submissions process.
Stricter than feels comfortable, and written down. The value of a written bar is consistency across your team and across time: without it, standards drift down whenever somebody is behind on a monthly target. Put the thresholds in a document, and make rejecting a domain a normal outcome rather than a failure.
Yes. A link from a high authority site in a language your customers do not read sends no relevant traffic and its relevance signal is weak. There are exceptions for genuinely international brands, but for most businesses a language mismatch should be a hard filter rather than a judgment call.
Related
Qualification is the front of the workflow. These cover what happens to a domain after it passes.
Supplier qualification feature
Composite scoring and enrichment at real list sizes.
Read moreOutreach workflow
What happens after a domain qualifies: contacts, templates, follow ups.
Read moreFor link builders
The full prospecting to placement loop for high volume specialists.
Read moreBacklink status checker
Verify an individual placement once it is live.
Read moreLink partnership CRM
Supplier records, rejection reasons, and contact history.
Read moreROI calculator
Estimate what your monthly link output is worth.
Read moreFurther reading
Where to set the bar, and the patterns that should fail a domain outright.
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The full bulk checker handles real list sizes with optional authority, traffic, and referring domain enrichment, and it records why every rejection was rejected.