Relevance comes before metrics.
The first question about any publication is whether it genuinely covers the client's subject, or could credibly start to. A gardening client linked from a strong finance site fails this check no matter what the numbers say, because a link that makes no editorial sense is a link that ages badly.
Relevance is the first quality control check, and it is judged by a person reading the site, not by a category field in a database. We look at what the publication has actually run in recent months, and whether our story would sit naturally beside it. The pool that passes runs from specialist titles to national news sites: recent placements have landed on Metro, the Daily Express and The Independent, and every one passed the same reading first.
Authority range: 40 to 95, and why it is a range.
We hold placements inside a DA and DR range of 40 to 95, measured with the common third-party tools. It is a range rather than a single threshold because both scores are proxies, and chasing any exact number invites the sites that are engineered to hit it.
The score is recorded twice: once at prospecting and once when the link goes live, so your report reflects the site as it was on the day, not as it looked when the list was built. A site whose numbers collapse between those two dates comes off the list.
Indexation, tracked rather than assumed.
A link on a page search engines never index does very little. After each placement goes live we track whether the page is picked up over the following weeks. If it is slow, we resubmit it and check again; if it stays out of the index, the placement fails QA and is replaced.
The indexation status appears against each link in your report. Most placements index without help because the publications are real and regularly crawled, which is one more reason the sourcing screens matter.
Anchor sanity.
Anchor text is planned per client at the brief stage and checked per link at QA. The plan leans heavily on branded terms and natural phrases, keeps exact-match commercial anchors rare, and is set against the client's existing profile so nothing we add stands out as manufactured.
We will decline an anchor request that would hurt the client, and say why in writing. An agency can overrule us on strategy, but not into an anchor pattern we believe puts the client's profile at risk; that protects your client and, honestly, our name for careful work.
What fails, and what happens next.
Typical failures: a site that turned out to sell placements in bulk once we looked closely, a page stacked with unrelated outbound links, a publication whose traffic has visibly collapsed, an anchor that drifted from the plan during editing, or a page that never entered the index.
A failed link never reaches your report. It is replaced at our cost, and the replacement runs through the same checks. If a link passes QA and is later removed within 90 days, the same replacement rule applies. The process only counts a link as delivered when it has survived all four quality control checks.