Niche Sites to Submit a Guest Post: How to Find and Vet Them

If you write in one niche, or place posts for clients in several, you've probably met the lists that promise 100 free guest post sites. A guest post site is a blog or publication that runs articles by outside writers under their own bylines. Most of those lists are never rechecked. Ours was no different: DA scores, Alexa ranks and not one date showing when anything was checked, so we rebuilt it.

We start with why the guide is split into 18 niches, then give the full vetting checklist from A to F, with a copy box of Google searches. A green, yellow and red scorecard comes next, then the verified sites by niche and how we checked them. We close with 21 niche guides and what we'd do with a shortlist. Each table carries the date we checked it, and the counts under each heading show what we dropped and why.

Why this guide is split into 18 niches

Before checking a single site, we looked at what brings people to this topic on our own site, because a list should follow what readers actually type. Our owner's Search Console data, read on October 31, 2026, shows 5.44k clicks and 35k impressions over the last 16 months from 463 queries containing "write for us". Those are DigitalTreed's private numbers. Treat them as one site's view of demand, not a market survey of who searches for guest post sites in each niche. Most of the clicks went to three pages: technology (1,325), SaaS (1,044) and business (1,043), which already have guides of their own.

Smaller niches had demand too. Investing, personal finance, money, banking, trading and fintech searches added up to about 900 impressions. People also looked for branding, small business, entrepreneurship and online business sites, and for blogging, IT, gadgets and tech tips, and each became a section here. We added common niches our data didn't cover yet, from health and travel to pets, parenting, automotive and legal, because writers there ask the same question. Want one long list across every niche instead? Our big checked list of guest posting sites does that job. This page answers a narrower question: which sites in my niche deserve a pitch, and how do I tell?

The vetting checklist, A to F

So how do you tell? Run six checks in this order and stop at the first red. A, B and C need only a browser and Google. D is easier with a vendor tool if you pay for one, and E and F mean opening a few posts and asking the seller direct questions.

A. History in the Wayback Machine and ICANN Lookup

Start with the past. A domain's history is the hardest thing for a seller to fake. Type the domain into the Wayback Machine and press Browse History, as the Internet Archive's help page describes. Note the year of the first capture, then open one capture per year and read the homepage title, which is the fastest way to spot a change of topic. Picture a made-up domain that was a wedding blog in 2014, a coupon site in 2017, a crypto news site in 2020 and a lifestyle magazine today.

Three changes in twelve years matches what Google's spam policies call expired domain abuse, a domain "purchased and repurposed primarily to manipulate search rankings".

The calendar's colors help too. Archive.org's help text says green dots mark captures where the crawler got a 3nn redirect, so a run of green is worth a click. Orange marks a 4nn client error, so a long orange stretch shows a time when the pages weren't found. Old redirects to casino, pharma or adult sites are a red, while long dark gaps or a sudden switch of language are a yellow worth a closer look. If you'd rather script it, the Wayback CDX API returns one capture a year with collapse=timestamp:4, which is how our own run collected its history. For today's redirects, our redirect checker shows every hop an old URL takes.

Then check the domain's age in ICANN Lookup. Registration data now travels over RDAP, which ICANN's RDAP overview says lets users "access current registration data" and calls "the replacement for the WHOIS protocol". Look for the registration event, which RFC 9083 describes as the date the object "was initially registered". A registration from last year on a domain with ten years of captures usually means the name lapsed and someone new picked it up. On its own that's a yellow. Add a change of topic in the Wayback titles and it's a red.

B. Google footprint searches you can copy

Next, let Google show you what the site publishes when nobody's pitching it. Every operator below is on Google's Refine searches help page. Quotes ask for an exact match and site: keeps you on one domain. Put a minus sign before a word to drop it, and use after: with a year to see only newer pages. Swap example.com for the domain under review and paste one line at a time.

Find candidates in your niche (swap in your own niche words)
"write for us" "personal finance"
"write for us" travel -casino
"contribute" "pet health"
"submit a guest post" parenting
"guest author" gardening after:2026/01/01

Vet one site (replace example.com)
site:example.com casino
site:example.com gambling
site:example.com betting
site:example.com CBD
site:example.com "payday loan"
site:example.com viagra
site:example.com "essay writing"
site:example.com apk
site:example.com crack
site:example.com inurl:category casino
site:example.com "sponsored post"
site:example.com "guest post by"
site:example.com "write for us"
"example.com" guest post price
"Example Site Name"   (the site should rank first for its own name)

Google's own site: operator page gives site:example.com viagra casino as a way of "identifying and monitoring spam problems on your site". The same page warns that the list it returns "is not always exhaustive", so zero results is good news rather than proof.

Read the hits, too: a cruise site can have an honest review of a ship's casino, and on a car site escort might mean the Ford.

Lots of "sponsored post" and "guest post by" results on a small blog point to a guest post factory that publishes whatever arrives with a payment. If the domain shows up next to a price in seller sheets or on link marketplaces, it's selling links, whatever its guidelines page says about editorial standards. Two last tests: search the site's brand name, which it ought to rank for, and compare the rough site: count with the number of URLs in its sitemap. A site that doesn't rank for its own name, even with the name typed in quotes, may be under a penalty.

C. Who reads the site?

Our traffic signal was a rank in Tranco, a research list that averages providers' rankings "over the past 30 days", as its methodology page explains. A rank tells you people visit a domain. It doesn't say who they are or where they live. If you have Similarweb or Ahrefs, read the country split, since US readers matter when your business sells in the US.

We had neither, so our run could name a likely country for only 11 of the 69 hub sites.

Then read like a customer would. Open five recent posts and ask who they're for: beginners, professionals or business buyers. Check the currency, the spelling and the examples, and whether the comments come from people or from accounts that only ever drop a link and leave.

Then ask yourself whether these readers would click your link and become your customers. If the five posts were written for students and you sell payroll software, the answer is no, whatever the metrics say.

D. Metrics, and whose metrics they are

Now the numbers sellers quote. Domain Rating is Ahrefs' score, and the Ahrefs explainer on DR says it shows a site's backlink strength "compared to the others in our database". Domain Authority is Moz's, and Moz's Domain Authority page says it's "not a direct ranking factor". Google's March 2024 spam policy post is blunter about scores like these: they "don't correspond to any of Google's own signals nor come from Google".

They're vendor metrics. They're useful for comparing two sites and weak for judging one on its own.

Moz Spam Score is a vendor metric as well. Moz's Spam Score help page rates 61%-100% as high, then adds that a high score "doesn't mean this site is necessarily spammy". The pattern we'd mark red is a mismatch, such as a DR or DA in the 60s with almost no organic traffic. A traffic line that fell off a cliff right after a Google spam update is just as bad, since a host that lost its traffic can't send any to you.

Our own rules of thumb add two yellows. One is a post with more than 50 outbound links. The other is a reverse IP lookup that shows dozens of look-alike sites on one server, which can mean a private blog network.

Last, run the domain through Google Safe Browsing, which shows warnings "when they attempt to navigate to dangerous sites".

E. Content and the editor

A real publication has a real editor. Google's helpful content guide asks whether "it's clear who created" a page, and you can ask the same of the site you're vetting. Are there bylines, an about page and an editor's name on the guidelines page? Search the editor's name with the site's name to see whether that person is real and still there. One author covering mortgages, keto and phone cases in the same week is a yellow. So is a site with no about page. Fifty AI-sounding posts a day is a red. That's close to what Google's spam policies call scaled content abuse, where "many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings".

Then open two guest posts already on the site and view the page source. Look for rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored" on outside links, and for a noindex tag on the guest category page, which sits in the page's head section. Google's noindex documentation says Google "will drop that page entirely from Google Search results" when it finds the rule.

A noindexed category doesn't sink the posts in it, but if the posts carry the tag too, yours won't show up in Google at all.

F. Rules, money and the law

The last check is about what changes once money is involved. Under link spam, Google's spam policies include "Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links". The same list names "links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites". Its 2017 post about article campaigns at scale adds that Google "does not discourage" guest articles that inform readers. A post that teaches something is fine. A run of them with exact-match anchors pointing home is what the policy describes.

If you pay, the link gets rel="sponsored". Google's page on qualifying outbound links asks sites to "Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements" that way. Hosts carry risk too. Google announced its site reputation abuse policy in March 2024, and it took effect on May 5, 2024. Its November 19, 2024 update says "no amount of first-party involvement alters the fundamental third-party nature of the content".

Before you order, ask for the exact site and a sample URL, because a seller who won't name the site is a red on its own.

A promise of "lifetime dofollow" is a red, because no host controls how Google treats a link for life. Pay in stages. Release the rest only after you've seen the draft. Our guide for sellers covers payment terms for paid guest posts, and the same terms protect the buyer.

The FTC cares about readers, not rankings. Its Endorsement Guides Q&A says that when a blogger gets "free products or other perks with the expectation" of promotion, "the FTC Act applies". Its native advertising guide names terms readers are likely to understand, among them "Ad" and "Sponsored Advertising Content", and tells advertisers not to use "Promoted". Once the post is live, check that it's indexed and that the rel value matches what you agreed, using a site: search for the URL and the page source. Then look again at 3 and 6 months, since hosts sometimes change old posts.

Score any site green, yellow or red

Keep this table beside your shortlist. The green column is what we'd accept without a second look, and anything in the red column ends the check for that site.

Two or more yellows? Open five recent posts and judge them before you decide. An all-green site still deserves a fresh look at its guidelines on pitch day, because pages close: our own reread on October 31 removed ten sites the script had passed. Here's the card applied to three sites from our tables, using only what our run recorded on October 31, 2026. The script scored four things, so audience, editor and money stay open until you check them yourself.

IEEE Spectrum, MIT Technology Review and American Horticultural Society picked up at least one yellow, which our rules allow: our drop line sat at a red. Across all 69 hub sites, 25 had one or two spam-word slugs and 33 ranked in the Tranco top 100,000. A yellow just means you open those URLs first.

Verified sites in money, business, marketing and tech niches

That scorecard is what every site below went through on October 31, 2026, and it's why the tables are short. We aimed for 10 sites per niche. Only one of 18 got there. Across the 18 niches, 1,397 candidates went in and 69 came out. Of those dropped, 516 had no live contributor page we could find, and 359 weren't in the Tranco top million. Another 249 blocked our checker, which we left alone rather than work around.

If your niche shows only two or three sites, the drop counts under its heading tell you why, and the A to F checks let you add your own.

Site names are plain text, and each row has one link, to that site's guidelines page, with rel="nofollow". Rows run by Tranco rank, best first. A smaller site lower down can still fit your topic better.

Investing, personal finance and fintech (2 sites)

Editors treat money pieces with more suspicion than most. Google's guide to people-first content groups them with "Your Money or Your Life" topics, where content "must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus". Only two of 130 finance candidates passed. The biggest losses were 61 sites with no contributor page and 26 that blocked our checker. Seeking Alpha, in the archive since 2004, runs a page about becoming a contributing analyst rather than a guest post inbox. Millennial Money, the smaller of the two, sits at Tranco rank 276,016.

Before you pitch either site, write down any stake you hold in what you'd cover. A careful editor will ask.

Small business, branding and entrepreneurship (2 sites)

Small business editors want a lesson from a business you've actually run, with the numbers left in. The two biggest names in this section failed our same-day reread. Shopify's page now says its team is "currently not accepting unsolicited guest posts or pitches", and Content Marketing Institute stopped taking them on October 23, 2023. Of the two left, Brandingmag says plainly that it "does not accept guest posts" and wants regular contributors instead. Search Engine Journal landed here in our run although it's an SEO title. Its sitemap held two gambling slugs, a yellow to open rather than a drop.

Blogging and online publishing (3 sites)

Blogging lost three sites on our reread. The ProBlogger URL in our run is a 2005 post asking readers to leave links in the comments. WPKube has "stopped accepting guest posts from new authors". And wpoven.com's page says "Two do-follow links are allowed", which is a red on our card. That leaves three. Writer's Digest cares about the craft of writing, not monetization. Imagify and ILOVEWP both ask for WordPress topics, so bring a how-to you've tested on a real install.

Gadgets, IT and tech tips (1 site)

Gadget and IT sites lost 22 of 64 candidates to bot blocks, and we didn't try to get around any of them. Android Central's page looked like a contributor page by its title, but on a second read it's a list of the freelancers the site already uses, so it's out. Tools and Toys, the one site left, wants product reviews and asks writers how they'd like to be paid.

AI and machine learning (5 sites)

AI editors set the bar at expertise. IEEE Spectrum's page is titled "Guidelines for Expert Authors", TOPBOTS asks for "Expert Contributor" content, and MIT Technology Review explains how to pitch its editors. Bring something you did yourself, such as a model you trained or an evaluation you ran. A roundup of other people's launch posts won't get far.

SEO and search marketing (2 sites)

SEO is where link sellers hide best. Across all 18 niches, our script caught seven candidates promising dofollow links on their guidelines pages, and five of them were SEO sites. Another 38 SEO candidates had no contributor page at all, and 20 had no Tranco rank, which leaves a list of two. Single Grain showed one casino slug and SEOreseller one payday slug, both yellows. Their first captures date back to 2006 and 2007, so both have spent close to two decades in one niche by their yearly titles. An SEO editor has read every definition of every term already. Pitch a test you ran on a real site, with the before and after numbers.

Real estate (2 sites)

Real estate had more bot blocks than any other niche here: 32 of 99 candidates. It's on the extra-review list of our own write-for-us page too. A wrong mortgage number costs a reader real money, and careful hosts know it. The Clever page at listwithclever.com asks personal finance and real estate experts for guest posts. Kukun's page says a promotional post's link gets a "no-follow" attribute, and that's the honest answer check E looks for. Chicago Agent Magazine's contribute page held only a 2014 title and a comment box when we reopened it, so we dropped it.

Legal (7 sites)

Legal is a YMYL niche too. Cite the statute or the court, and name the state you're writing about. Four of the seven legal sites use a UK, Canadian or Indian domain. Resolution, for one, serves family lawyers in England and Wales. For US readers, Attorney at Law Magazine, the Attorney at Work site (attorneyatwork.com) and the DC Bar are the closer fits. Read each page for its audience first. Live Law has the best traffic signal of the seven, at Tranco rank 35,918, and it's an Indian site.

We dropped 4 legal candidates for spam footprints and 3 more for selling links, farming content or taking vice topics.

Verified sites in health, home, family and leisure niches

Those first eight niches overlap with what DigitalTreed publishes. The next ten don't. So there's no pitch-us line for them. Running a site in one of them, with real readers? You can list it on our publisher marketplace, and publishers earn the order price minus our 20% commission (and minus TDS, an Indian tax, where it applies). The same checks applied here, and the same three reasons kept the lists short.

Health and wellness (7 sites)

Health is the second YMYL niche, and Google's helpful content page names it outright: topics that could "significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people". SELF and Live Science both explain how to pitch a story. Expect an editor who commissions work, not one who takes finished posts.

WellBeing Magazine is Australian, which matters if your readers are in the US. Think Global Health wants analysis of global health, from trade and migration to food policy, so a how-to for one US clinic won't fit there.

Travel (5 sites)

Travel lost more candidates to a missing Tranco rank than to anything else: 36 of 96. Plenty of travel blogs are one-person sites with loyal readers and too little reach for the top million. That's a limit of our rule, not a verdict on them.

The site at intrepidtravel.com belongs to a tour company. Porthole's two casino slugs may well be about ship casinos, but open them first.

Fashion and beauty (3 sites)

Fashion and beauty lost 37 of 96 candidates to a missing Tranco rank. Popsugar's page sits on its careers site, so it's a paid freelance route rather than a guest post inbox.

Food (1 site)

Food was the hardest niche of all: one site passed out of 89 candidates. Among the drops, 44 showed us no contributor page, 15 blocked our checker, 13 lacked a Tranco rank and 13 never answered. So the gap in food is about access, not quality. Most candidates never showed us a page we could judge. The one that passed, foodmatters.com, leans toward wellness and showed one viagra and one CBD slug. Food candidates also lost 2 to spam footprints and 1 to a content farm reading. For recipe blogs, run the A to F checks on the sites you already cook from.

Education (10 sites)

Education is the one niche that reached our aim of 10. Eight of the ten first appear in the Wayback Machine in 2011 or earlier, so most have years of history behind them. Its spam phrase is essay writing. Study Abroad Nations showed two essay-writing-services slugs and ISTE one essay-writing slug, which is why both sit at yellow. EdSurge and The Hechinger Report are education news outlets, so bring classroom data, not a sales angle. The best-ranked is We Are Teachers at Tranco rank 40,484, and four of the ten sit inside the top 50,000.

The Learning Technology Center writes for Illinois K-12 schools, and its readers are teachers in one state.

Lifestyle and self-improvement (4 sites)

Lifestyle is the niche content farms love most, and 25 of 64 candidates had no Tranco rank. The four that passed lean toward self-improvement, with Addicted 2 Success and Tiny Buddha among them. Pick the Brain was cut on our reread. Its page says the byline link will send "a healthy dose of traffic and PageRank", and that's a followed-link promise in other words. Tiny Buddha showed two betting slugs, and The Trent one viagra and one casino slug. Open those before you pitch.

Home improvement (4 sites)

The home titles that passed are old hands. Family Handyman first appears in the Wayback Machine in 1999, and Almanac.com in 1996.

Pets (3 sites)

CBD slugs on a pet site (Preventive Vet had one, Petful two) can be honest coverage of CBD for animals, or sponsored filler. Read the posts and decide.

Parenting and family (6 sites)

Parenting had more no-rank drops than any other niche: 51 of 94 candidates. Many family blogs have devoted readers and modest reach, and our top-million rule cut them even where the guidelines page was live. ParentMap writes for families in the Seattle area, which matters if your business sells nationwide.

A Fine Parent passed the script but not our reread: its page says the editorial queue is full and it's "not accepting new articles".

Automotive (2 sites)

Bot blocks hit 30 of 81 automotive candidates, so this list is short for a reason that says nothing about the quality of the sites that blocked us. HotCars' page is hiring information for freelance writers. Motor Verso passed the script, then failed our reread. Its page ends with a block of phrases such as "become a guest blogger" and "now accepting guest posts". That reads as bait for writers' searches, not help for them.

Smaller niche sites with search traffic (checked November 2, 2026)

Our top-million rule cut plenty of niche blogs with loyal readers. So on November 2, 2026 we went back to the unranked sites that still had a live contributor page and recent posts. We looked each one up in Ahrefs' free traffic checker and reread its page that day. These 17 showed organic visits, and they're still inviting outside writers. Two more didn't survive the reread: one has closed its guest program, and one sells sponsored posts for extra links.

Look at the top country before you pitch. Online Clothing Study, Shilpa Ahuja and Dazzlerr draw their biggest audience from India. TechSansar's is in Nepal, Financial Horse's in Singapore, Real Estate Asia's in Indonesia and Timeless Travels' in the UK. Several estimates are small, too. Solicitor News, GeekEstate Blog and Techs And Games each sit under 100 visits a month, so count a byline there as a portfolio credit, not a source of readers.

How did we check 1,397 candidate sites?

Every table above came from one script run on October 31, 2026. Here's what it did, so you can repeat any step by hand on a site we didn't cover.

Every request was a plain GET whose user agent named DigitalTreed, pausing 1.5 seconds or more between hits on one host. It also obeyed each site's robots.txt, the file RFC 9309 standardizes. A 401, 403, 429 or 503, a Cloudflare challenge or a CAPTCHA counted as unchecked, and that site stayed out. We didn't work around a single block. To pass, a candidate needed four things. First came a contributor page that loaded on the candidate's own domain, then a rank in Tranco list PYK6J, dated October 29, 2026. It couldn't have 3 or more spam-word slugs outside its niche, and its Wayback history couldn't show niche-hopping, judged from up to five yearly homepage titles.

No Ahrefs, Semrush or Similarweb data went into any table here. A Tranco rank is our only traffic signal, which is why audience stays a check for you to run.

A second pass the same day rescanned the sites dropped for spam with whole-word matching, so bare words like slot, loan and poker no longer counted against them. It also searched footers and sitemaps for contributor pages the first pass missed, and added new candidates for the thinnest niches.

A person then read every page the script accepted and dropped the ones that weren't really for contributors, such as articles that only mentioned the word pitch. Later that day a second reader reopened all 79 kept pages by plain GET and cut ten more. Four said they'd stopped taking guest posts or new articles, and three weren't calls for writers at all. Another two promised followed links or PageRank, and one ended in a block of guest post search phrases. Each one is named in its niche's note above.

What we tested

For the 18 hub niches, 1,397 unique candidates went through the check and 69 passed. The drops: 516 had no contributor page, 359 had no Tranco rank, 249 blocked our checker and 145 didn't answer or returned an error. The other 49 failed on spam footprints (30), dofollow promises (7), content farms (4), link selling (4), topic changes (2) and casino, CBD or loan topics (2). A further 204 rows were repeats of candidates already counted. Of the no-rank sites, 80 still had a live guidelines page by our script's test, and our rule left them out. We've since checked them in a free traffic tool. The 17 that held up are listed above.

The last ten are the reread cuts named in the notes, which is how 79 script passes became 69. Across all 21 sections of the run, including the three niche guides, the script itself passed 128 sites out of 2,154 candidate rows, before any reread.

Niche guides for 21 more topics

Once you've picked a niche, its own guide covers what its editors ask for, its search strings, its spam footprints and a pitch example.

Three guides lead the set, and they drew most of the Search Console clicks we cited at the top. Pick from the SaaS guest post guide, our guide to business blogs that take writers or the technology blogs guide for guest writers. Marketers have the digital marketing guest post guide and the social media write for us guide. The PPC guest post guide and the B2B marketing write for us guide cover paid search and B2B.

Builders and developers have six of their own. There's the software development guest post guide, the Python write for us guide and the website development guest post guide. Then come the web design write for us guide, the graphic design guest post guide and the web hosting write for us guide. Infrastructure writers can add the cloud computing guest post guide. Money topics get extra care, so read the finance write for us guide, the cryptocurrency guest post guide and the blockchain write for us guide. Managers can use the business management guest post guide. For sport and play, there's the sports write for us guide, the cricket guest post guide and the game write for us guide.

What we'd do with a shortlist of 20

If we were pitching in one niche tomorrow, we'd start with that niche's table and add enough sites from our own footprint searches to reach 20. Then we'd run the A to F checks on all of them in one sitting. Before writing a word, we'd test each guidelines URL in the status code checker on DigitalTreed, because a page that now redirects to the homepage has probably closed. Then we'd pitch the five whose readers look most like our customers, one idea each. The other fifteen can wait a month.

Questions about niche guest post sites

How we made this guide: The tables and every count come from our site-check run of October 31, 2026. A build script pulls them in, so nobody retyped a site name or a number. The rule pages linked above were read the same day by plain GET. We didn't sign up anywhere, submit anything or contact any editor. Facts checked by the DigitalTreed team on October 31, 2026.

First published October 14, 2022, when the post listed 100+ sites with DA scores and Alexa ranks. Rewritten October 31, 2026: a vetting checklist, a scorecard and verified sites in 18 niches.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search
• Google Search Central: Qualify your outbound links to Google
• Google Search Central Blog: A reminder about links in large-scale article campaigns (May 25, 2017)
• Google Search Central Blog: March 2024 core update and new spam policies (March 5, 2024)
• Google Search Central Blog: Updating our site reputation abuse policy (November 19, 2024)
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Google Search Central: Block Search indexing with noindex
• Google Search Central: site: search operator
• Google Search Help: Refine Google searches
• Google Safe Browsing
• Internet Archive Help Center: Using the Wayback Machine
• Internet Archive: Wayback CDX Server API
• ICANN: Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP)
• ICANN Lookup
• IETF RFC 9083: JSON Responses for the Registration Data Access Protocol
• IETF RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol
• Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation
• Tranco: Methodology
• Ahrefs Help Center: What is Domain Rating (DR)? (vendor metric)
• Moz: Domain Authority (vendor metric)
• Moz Help: Spam Score (vendor metric)
• FTC: FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking
• FTC: Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses