How to check a forum backlink delivery in 15 minutes

Most people who buy forum links never open them. They read a spreadsheet, compare the row count to the invoice, and move on. That is the whole quality control at most vendors’ customers, and the vendors know it.

The good news is that a forum delivery is one of the easier things in link building to audit. Every link is a public page. You do not need a paid tool, and you do not need to trust me: you need a browser and about fifteen minutes.

I sell these links, so I have a stake in how this reads. I have tried to write the checklist I would want a buyer to run on my own work.

Before you open anything: what the report must contain

A delivery is a spreadsheet, not a screenshot and not a summary. For every placement you should have:

• the live URL of the page the link sits on;
• the anchor used and the page it points to;
• the link type (forum thread, profile, Web 2.0, blog comment);
• the DR of the domain, and how it was measured;
• the platform (which forum software or property);
• the date it went live.

If any column is missing, that is your first finding. A report without live URLs cannot be checked, which is usually the point of sending one.

In short: if you cannot click every row, it is not a report.

The sample

Pick ten to fifteen rows yourself. Do not take the first ten, which are the ones a vendor would clean up. Sort the sheet by a column that has nothing to do with quality (date, or alphabetically by domain) and pick every fifth row.

Then open each one and run the same seven checks.

The seven checks

1. Is it live, and is it the URL on the sheet?

Open the link. You want a normal page with a 200 status, not a redirect to the forum’s front page, not a “thread not found”, and not a login wall. A redirect is the quiet failure: the URL in the report resolves, and the post is gone.

2. Is your link actually in it?

Search the page for your domain (Ctrl+F is enough). Then check three things:

• the anchor text matches what you ordered;
• it points to the right target page, not the home page by default;
• it sits in the body of a post, not only in a signature or a profile field, unless that is what you bought.

Position matters because a link in a real post is read differently from a link in a footer-style signature that repeats under every reply.

3. What does the rel attribute say?

Right-click the link, choose Inspect, and read the rel value. You will see one of four things: nothing (dofollow), nofollow, ugc, or sponsored.

Do not treat nofollow as a fault by default. Most forum software adds it automatically, and Google has treated these attributes as hints since 2020. The question is only whether the split matches the promise. If you were told to expect a mix, count the mix in your sample and see if it is roughly what was described.

4. Is the thread real?

This is the check that separates a delivery from padding. Look at the thread:

• when was it started, and when was the last reply before yours?
• are there other people in it, or only the original poster and a link?
• is the post on topic for the thread and written like something a person would say?
• is the board alive, meaning recent posts in other threads too?

A thread with eight replies from six different users and a post that answers the question is a placement. A thread with three posts from the same day, all with links, is a farm.

5. Is the text unique?

Copy a distinctive sentence from the post, put it in quotation marks, and search for it. If the same sentence appears on other forums under other accounts, the vendor is pasting one text everywhere. It costs them nothing, and it leaves a footprint that is easy to see once you look for it.

6. Do the metrics hold up?

Run the domain through any authority and traffic checker; Ahrefs and Semrush both offer free versions. You are checking two things: the DR is in the neighbourhood of what the report says, and the domain has some real traffic. A domain with a DR of 45 and no traffic at all is worth a question.

7. Is it indexed?

Search the exact thread URL in Google. If it comes back, it is indexed. If it does not, do not conclude the link is worthless. New threads on quiet boards routinely sit uncrawled for weeks, and the check is not conclusive either way.

What this check is really for is knowing what you have. Unindexed links are the reason tier-2 links exist, and indexation is normally an add-on, not something a vendor can promise for free.

If you would rather not open every row by hand, the free link checker does the mechanical half of checks 1 to 3: paste the rows and it reports status, whether your link is there, the anchor, the rel value, and whether robots.txt or noindex hides the page from Google. Checks 4 to 7 still need your eyes.

Across the whole sheet

Once the sample is done, look at the list as a whole:

• Repeated domains. Twenty links on four domains is not twenty placements. Count distinct root domains.
• Dates. Everything live on one day at the same minute suggests a script. A manual order arrives spread across days.
• Anchors. Compare the split to what you agreed. A brief for brand and bare URLs that arrives as fifteen exact-match anchors was not followed.
• The mix of types. If you ordered forum threads and half the rows are profile pages, you were sold the cheaper product at the dearer price.

What a normal delivery looks like, flaws included

A clean sample does not mean zero problems. On a real volume order, expect:

• a small share of links to be nofollow or ugc, because that is what forum software does;
• some threads not yet indexed at delivery;
• an occasional dead link within the first weeks, when a moderator cleans up or a board closes.

None of these is fraud. What makes it fraud is a pattern: most of the sample failing the same check. And what makes the difference between a vendor and a seller of PDFs is what happens next, which is the replacement window. Mine is six months, and the terms say in writing what counts and what does not. Ask any vendor for theirs before you pay, not after.

The short version

1. Get a spreadsheet with live URLs. No URLs, no deal.
2. Pick fifteen rows yourself.
3. For each: live, link present, anchor and target right, rel as promised, thread real, text unique, DR plausible.
4. Look at the whole sheet for repeated domains and one-day timestamps.
5. Send every failure to the vendor in one message, with URLs.

The same checklist works on anyone’s order, including mine, and it is the reason I publish what the market actually charges: a price only means something if you know what you are checking it against.

If you want to see how a delivery looks for a moderated-forum order, where every board is checked before the post goes in, ask and I will send a redacted sample, or see the sample report that is already public.