Editorial Guest Placements for Regulated Operators

What we check before pitching a publication: A placement earns its price when the section carrying it already receives search traffic for queries adjacent to what you sell. We verify that first, and across the last twelve target lists clients handed us it disqualified about two thirds of the sites on them. Domain Rating did not predict which ones survived. The screen runs four passes. First, page-level traffic: we pull the publication's top pages in Ahrefs and Semrush, then ask the editor for a Search Console export covering the section we would sit in. Publications that decline the export are not disqualified, but they price differently. Second, the sponsored ratio: we count paid-looking posts published in the last six months against total output. Past roughly one in five, the section reads as inventory to a spam classifier and to a human reviewer, and we drop it. Third, indexation of the section itself — an author archive or category page Google has dropped is a signal the whole subfolder is being discounted. Fourth, Wayback: a site that ran nothing commercial for eight years and then filled with casino posts in one quarter has changed hands, and we treat it as a new domain with no history. How the piece gets written: We pitch an angle, not a slot. For gambling and crypto clients that usually means something the publication cannot get elsewhere — payout data, a regulatory read, an operator comparison built from licence conditions rather than affiliate feeds. The draft is written by a named writer we brief and pay, and you approve it before the editor sees it. Anchor text is decided at brief stage, never renegotiated after publication, because an editor asked to change an anchor post-publication remembers you as a link buyer and prices you that way forever. Regulated-market handling: UK gambling placements carry 18+ and safer-gambling signposting and are written against CAP Code section 16, including the rules on strong appeal to under-18s that catch sports and gaming imagery. Crypto placements aimed at UK consumers sit inside the financial promotions regime effective 8 October 2023: either the piece is approved by an FCA-authorised person, or it is written so it does not invite or induce, or it is placed outside UK consumer reach. We tell you which of the three applies before you pay for anything. Regulated finance placements get the same read against COBS 4 on fair, clear and not misleading. Not included: We do not write your money pages, do not touch internal linking, and do not manage the affiliate relationships most operators already run. We do not place on a domain we have not screened ourselves, so a list you found elsewhere is an input to the screen rather than a purchase order. We do not guarantee rankings; the placement is the deliverable, and ranking movement depends on pages we do not control. Reporting: Live URL, indexation of the host page at 30 days, link survival at 90 days, and rank movement on the mapped queries taken from Search Console rather than a third-party average. If nothing moves after two quarters we say so and recommend stopping, which is the opposite of what a placement seller is paid to do. Who should not buy this: Anyone who needs a fixed count per month to justify the line item. Anyone whose current programme is priced per DR band — you will find us expensive per link and cheaper per placement that is still there in a year. Anyone launching a brand-new domain in a regulated vertical this quarter, where placements are the wrong first spend and we will tell you what is.