Find guest post sites, then find out which ones are worth it

The operator everyone uses is the one to use last

Every guide to this subject opens with “write for us”, and every prospecting tool leads with it. Which is the problem. It is the single most-run search in link building, so the sites it returns are the sites that have received the most outreach — often thousands of emails, frequently from people offering money.

A site that ranks for several of those explicit operators at once is telling you something. It is not that they are keen on contributors; it is that soliciting contributions is a large part of what the site does. That correlates closely with paid-link density, which is the first thing our own vetting checks and the most common reason a site never reaches our marketplace.

So the searches here are ordered the other way round. Bylines first, because a site that publishes outside writers without advertising for them has an editor making choices. Editorial guidelines next, because writing guidelines is what publications do. The explicit operators are still there — they find real sites too — but they come with a note telling you to vet the results rather than pitch them blind.

What happens after you have a list

A list of two hundred domains is not progress. Most prospecting stops here, and the usual next step is to load them into a tool that reports domain rating, then email whichever ones clear an arbitrary threshold. That is how people end up buying placements on sites that look fine on paper and pass nothing.

The second step of this tool answers the only question that actually saves you time: have we already looked at this? For 410 domains the answer is yes, and you get the price we sell it at. For anything we have audited, you get the verdict. For everything else you get an honest nothing, because inventing a signal we do not have would make the whole tool worthless.