Red-flag list
Dofollow backlinks on eco sites: nine greenwash red flags
Plenty of sites wear a leaf logo and little else. Here is how to tell a real sustainability publisher from a link farm with a green coat of paint.
Could the site's last five posts be read by a gardener without embarrassment? If the pages feel like they were made to hold links rather than to be read, walk away. A lower price never fixes that.
Why green niches attract hollow offers
Sustainability is a crowded corner of the web, and crowds attract copycats. Quick money follows. Words like organic, natural and planet-friendly are cheap to type and costly to check.
A link from a site that only borrows those words gives your blog nothing a reader would recognise. Worse, it can sit next to payday loans or casino pages, and Google's SpamBrain system has been trained to notice that kind of neighbourhood, so keep clear.
Dofollow backlinks only help when the page carrying them belongs in the conversation. So we start with warnings. Not a pitch. Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic each show a donor from a slightly different angle, and checking two of them costs little.
The nine flags, grouped by where they show up
None of these is an automatic verdict. Two or three together usually are.
Traffic that does not match the rating
A high Domain Rating beside near-zero organic traffic means the number was inflated by other links, not by readers. Compare both columns in the donor row.
A niche that jumps around
One week it is vegan skincare, the next it is crypto signals, then solar panels. Real eco publishers stay in their lane.
Posts that all end with a link
If every article closes with a pitched link to a business, nobody is reading for the content.
No author, no about page, no contact
Real publishers want to be found. Anonymous sites with stock photography rarely build trust in readers or in search engines.
Impossible claims on the page itself
Carbon neutral miracles, zero-waste cures, and other grand promises with no source. Those words say the site is selling, not reporting.
Hundreds of outbound links per page
A link hidden in a wall of other links is a poor neighbour. Open the donor and scroll before you decide.
Recycled stock articles
Paste one sentence from a post into a search box. If it appears on twenty other domains, move on.
Promises about rankings
Any seller who guarantees positions is guessing. We say it plainly: nobody controls Google's results.
Prices that are out of step
A strong site selling at a rock-bottom price deserves a closer look at why. So does a weak site at a premium.
A greenwash flag next to its healthier twin
| Warning sign | What a healthier version looks like |
|---|---|
| Rating 60, traffic near zero | Moderate rating, steady organic visitors |
| Fifty niches in one month | Two or three related topics, years of archive |
| No named editor | An about page and a way to write to the team |
| Link inserted in an unrelated post | A paragraph written around your page's actual topic |
Ninety seconds before you add a donor to your basket
- Open the site on your phone and read two posts.
- Compare Domain Rating with organic traffic in the donor row.
- Search a distinctive sentence from the newest post.
- Look for an author, an about page and a contact route.
- Ask yourself if a reader of your blog would click through happily.
What we do and do not claim
Our marketplace lists more than 50,000 vetted donor domains. Vetted is a screening step. It is not a verdict, so you still read each row, and since the March 2024 spam update added policies on scaled content abuse, that care matters more than before.
Placements are permanent and dofollow, written for you automatically unless you bring your own text. If a donor looks off to you, simply leave it out of the basket. Nothing is charged until you pay.
For a calm walk through that process, try our first order walkthrough or the glossary for any term that trips you up.