Editorial Guidelines
How Every Listing Is Checked
The rules behind every listing: what we measure, where each figure comes from, and what we refuse to do. If a listing ever breaks one of these rules, tell us and we will fix it.
How a site gets listed
A publication is added once we have its domain and have run it through the full benchmark described below. We then file it under one main subject, chosen from what the site actually publishes — its recent articles and its own categories — rather than from what it says it covers.
Publishers can ask to be listed through the contact page. A listing request is treated exactly like any other site: the same checks, the same page, the same rules.
Where every figure comes from
All figures are collected in-house, in a single run, from the same set of tools:
| Figure | Source | How it is read |
|---|---|---|
| Domain Authority, Page Authority | Moz | Domain and home-page metrics from Moz’s link index |
| Spam score | Moz | Moz’s percentage of penalty-linked features |
| Referring domains, backlinks | Moz | Link counts for the domain |
| Domain Rating | Ahrefs | Ahrefs’ published Domain Rating for the domain |
| Organic traffic, keywords | Semrush | Estimated monthly US organic visits and ranking keywords |
| Home-page links | Semrush | Backlinks to the home page URL |
None of these figures is supplied by the publisher, and none is typed in by hand.
Checks run on the domain
- Registration date — read from the domain registry’s RDAP record. A date that is missing, malformed or in the future is discarded.
- Platform — detected from the home page markup (WordPress, Shopify, Ghost and others).
- Indexed pages — counted from the site’s XML sitemap, including every child sitemap. If the full sitemap cannot be read, no count is shown, because a partial count would understate the site.
- Update cadence — worked out from recent sitemap dates, ignoring days when a site rewrote thousands of dates at once.
- AI-crawler policy — read from robots.txt, following the robots exclusion standard.
- Language — as declared in the page markup.
What we never fill in
If a check does not return a value, the field is left off the listing. We never show a zero, a dash, an estimate or a placeholder where a real reading should be. A measured zero is shown as zero; a missing reading is simply absent.
One case is treated specially: when Moz has not yet indexed a new domain, Moz itself assigns it a Domain Authority of 1. We show that value, as Moz does, and the rest of the listing still carries every other figure we could measure.
Dates and refreshes
Every listing is checked in the same run and shows the date of that run. When the directory is refreshed, every listing is re-checked together, so figures on different listings are always from the same day and can be compared fairly.
Prices
We do not print placement prices. Publishers change their rates often, and a price on the page would soon be wrong. Every listing says “Email for details”, and we reply with the rate that applies on the day you ask.
Independence
Figures on a listing are never changed because a publisher asks, pays or complains. The only way a figure changes is when a new benchmark run returns a different value. Where the site uses links to publishers, those links carry rel="nofollow".
Corrections and removals
If you think a figure is wrong, or a listing breaks one of these rules, email hello@hitechpccouk.com with the listing’s address. We re-run the checks for that site and correct the page if the new reading differs.
A publisher who no longer wants to be listed can ask for removal from the same address.
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