DA 90 backlinks from news sites: eleven checks first
A big authority number is the cheapest thing to show and the easiest to over-trust. Run these eleven checks, in this order, before a news-site link goes anywhere near your basket.
DA is a Moz metric and DR is an Ahrefs metric. Our rows show Domain Rating. Neither one is used by Google, so treat both as a rough sort order.
The eleven checks
- Open the donor's homepage. Does it look like a publication people read?
- Compare organic traffic against Domain Rating. A high score with tiny traffic is a warning.
- Look at the traffic trend in Ahrefs or Semrush for the last twelve months. A cliff after a core update deserves a question.
- Count the referring domains and glance at where they come from.
- Scan the last ten articles. Are they about one beat or about anything that pays?
- Check whether paid posts are labelled, since Google's guidance expects sponsored links to be marked.
- Search the donor name plus 'casino' or 'payday' to see whether it hosts unrelated junk.
- Confirm the niche fits your story, not just your industry.
- Confirm language and country match the readers you want.
- Read the price against the numbers. Authority and traffic should explain the cost.
- Decide the anchor before you order: brand name or plain URL beats an exact-match phrase.
Why traffic beats the score
Authority scores are built from links. Traffic is built from readers. A site can buy its way to a high score without ever earning an audience, and that gap is where weak placements hide.
Look at a local daily with a Domain Rating in the 40s and steady visits, then at a dormant domain rated 70. Most buyers should prefer the first. Real readers also click through.
Our rows show organic traffic next to the rating for this reason. The numbers come from our own crawler and our own index, so they refresh about monthly, and a very recent change may not show yet.
What the checks cannot tell you
No checklist predicts how Google will treat a link. It narrows the field, and that is the extent of it.
Tools disagree with each other, too. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz and Majestic each crawl a different slice of the web, so the same donor can show a rating of 48 in one and 61 in another. Compare like with like, and do not mix scores from different tools in one spreadsheet.
Google's March 2024 core update and the spam policy changes that came with it removed visibility from many sites that had been built for links. A donor that looked healthy in 2023 can look very different now, which is why the traffic trend sits so high on the list.
If a row passes all eleven checks, order one placement, not ten. That is the cheapest test. Our walkthrough of a single order shows how, and the myth table helps if results disappoint.
How we would read three imaginary rows
| Row | Rating | Traffic | Reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regional daily, 12 years old | DR 52 | Steady, local | Strong for a local brand |
| Rebranded domain, mixed topics | DR 74 | Falling | Ask why before paying |
| Niche trade site, small | DR 38 | Small but on-topic | Good for a specialist launch |
Rule of thumb
Pay for the audience first, the rating second
If two rows cost the same, pick the one whose visitors could plausibly buy from you. If they differ in price, ask what the extra money buys that a reader would notice.
- Relevance beats size for small brands.
- Price is information, so read it.
- One good placement teaches more than five average ones.