Link survival: does a bought link stay up?

• The publisher sells the slot again, or prunes old sponsored posts.
• The article is unpublished, redirected, or the site changes hands.
• The link is kept but changed: a nofollow or sponsored attribute added, the page set to noindex, the anchor swapped.
• The seller never placed it where they said, or placed it on a different domain.

Every delivered placement is fetched at 0, 7, 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 days. Each check records whether the link is present, its rel attributes, the final URL after redirects, the canonical, whether the page is indexable, its title, word count, how many external links share the page and where ours sits among them, and the text around the anchor. An order records the first check that found the link missing and the check that found it restored, if any. The method is on the data sources page.

Rolled up per publisher from our own orders: how many we bought, what share was live at the latest check, what share was live at 90 days or later, the median days before a lost link went missing, and the share still followed. It appears on offers, quote lines and the site view as survival, null under three orders because one link’s fate is an anecdote. The line’s why speaks it: “95% of our 41 placements here still live at 90+ days”.

The check-in flow chases the supplier; a placement that is not restored is treated as a failure, the supplier’s scorecard records it, and the refund follows the supplier making us whole. Survival is a fifth of the publisher’s Placement Score and a fifth of the supplier’s reliability score, so a publisher or seller that loses links is quoted less often the next time, within a few percent of price.

We publish the rates once the sample supports them, per publisher on the row and in aggregate on the research pages, and not before: our own order history is young and a rate from a handful of links would be a guess with a decimal point. What we will not do is quote an industry figure we did not measure.