Confirming a target page is real: crawler vs. eyeball

Confirming a target page is real: crawler vs. eyeball

A quieter tradeoff that came up in a tooling thread.

— A blog walked through using a crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb) on the donor to verify your target page is internally linked and reachable in a few clicks — not an orphan the buyer can't even navigate to.
— Counterpoint from a forum: for a single placement, crawling the whole site is overkill; just check the page's own backlink count and whether it appears in the site's menu or sitemap.
— Also circulating: a reminder that some sellers place inserts on orphaned pages precisely because no one will notice or prune them — cheap, but the link passes little and ranks nothing.

Editor's note: orphan detection is the unglamorous step most buyers skip and later regret.

Pick of the week: one placement, check the sitemap; bulk buying from one donor, run the crawler.