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HIGH GROUND / LINK ASSESSMENT

Look beyond
the domain rating.

Seven signals. One evidence-led assessment. Check whether a backlink opportunity fits your niche, not just its headline metrics.

7 assessment categoriesEvidence referencesTransparent weights

01 / THE OPPORTUNITY

Assess a backlink provider

Just enter domain.com. No https:// or www needed.

Organic dataset: United States, English. Scores depend on the stated niche.

Add optional placement and DR

Comparable domains are discovered automatically. Without a proposed placement, an observed article from ranking URLs or homepage links may support a clearly labelled environment assessment. DR is display-only and never affects the score.

Optional: use a page on the provider domain above. Leave blank if no placement page is agreed.

No account required. Check one site, or switch to Several sites to compare up to 10 at once. Each site takes about a minute. Every result gets a share link.

THE FRAMEWORK

What the seven signals measure

Scores use the supplied HighGround rubric. The overall result is calculated in code, not decided by the AI. A full grade requires evidence for all seven categories.

Topical relevance 20%

Niche relevance using actual content, ranking URLs, keywords and topic concentration, not keyword count alone.

Organic visibility 20%

Documented numeric bands: keyword breadth 40%, ranking-page breadth 35%, estimated traffic 25%, in the stated market; calculated in code, not by AI.

Referring-domain quality 15%

Quality and diversity of referring domains, with spam and sample limits.

Outbound-link behavior 10%

Editorial/commercial linking in bounded homepage and observed article samples, citing the actual page used, not a sitewide crawl.

Placement context 15%

Verified proposed page or explicitly labelled provider-environment article sample, not a guarantee of the purchased placement.

Brand and entity signals 10%

Functioning publisher, identity, authors, history and contact signals; self-declarations are not external validation.

Link opportunity gap 10%

Source rarity 40%, source quality 25%, editorial uniqueness 20%, competitor scarcity 15%, using automatically discovered comparable domains.

Good / balanced publisher standard. Nearest whole number, .5 upward, applied to Gap and final weighted HG Score. Original supplied examples are retained unchanged as reference data. AI-assisted scores are opinions based on available evidence, not guarantees of rankings or link value.