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Track paid backlinks that vanish after three months

A placement you bought can disappear without a message. A monthly snapshot costs a few credits and turns that surprise into a column of dates.

LinkBuildingStat research team ·

The monthly routine

  • Keep a sheet with one row per placement: URL, domain, date bought, price
  • On the same day each month, pull refdomains for your target and mark which domains are present
  • Mark absent rows with the month, never delete them
  • Check the page itself by hand when a domain goes missing
  • Write the lookup date at the top of the sheet

One request per month

The refdomains call costs 2 credits whatever the number of rows, up to 1,000 per call.

bash
curl -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." "https://linkbuildingstat.com/api.php?action=refdomains&q=mysite.com&per=1000&sort=desc"

Reading a gap without fooling yourself

A missing domain has two causes. The publisher removed the link, or our monthly crawl has not caught it yet.

So one absence is a prompt, not a finding. Two absent months in a row, plus a visual check of the page, is a finding you can show the vendor.

If you want real-time alerts, dedicated monitoring tools exist, and they will beat a monthly snapshot on speed. What this routine buys is a trend line for a few cents, and a dated record when you ask for a replacement.

Choosing what to record

Keep the columns few. Domain, URL, price, date bought, and one cell per month. More columns invite more work that nobody does.

Add a note field for events you know about. A site migration on the publisher's side or a CMS change often explains a mass removal, and the note saves an argument next quarter.

If you bought many placements, summarise with a rate: removed divided by bought, with the count of placements stated. Ten placements and two removals is a rate of 20 percent, but n is 10, so quote the n.

The benchmark sheet can hold the same data in a second tab. Pair it with what you learned from counting before a disavow.

What it cannot do

It cannot tell you why a link vanished, whether the page was deleted, or whether Google ever counted it. It also cannot warn you in real time; for that you need a monitoring service, and our monthly data is the wrong tool.

What it gives you is a tidy history, a rate, and a conversation with a vendor that begins with evidence. Google introduced rel=sponsored and rel=ugc in September 2019, and many paid placements now carry such attributes, so check the markup when you inspect a page: a sponsored link may be present yet valued differently.

Why bother with a sheet

Placements are bought on trust. A publisher's note that the link will stay up is a promise, and promises about links tend to last as long as the page does.

With a dated sheet you can say 'present in March, April and May, absent in June and July' and ask for a replacement. Without one, you are offering a feeling. A feeling is easy to refuse.

The cost is trivial: at 2 credits per pull, twelve monthly pulls are 24 credits, or $0.0024.

A hypothetical sheet after four months

Invented placements. P means present in that month's pull, dash means absent.
PlacementMonth 1Month 2Month 3Month 4
blog-a.examplePPPP
blog-b.examplePP--
news-c.example-PP-

What the sheet says

The second row is the one to chase: two absent months and a check by hand. The third row is odd, and looks like a crawl gap in month one rather than a removal.

Count your own loss rate as removed placements divided by bought, with n stated, and keep it for the next purchase.