Monitoring paid links

What is different about paid links

A paid placement is a contract with a deliverable. The buyer paid for a link on a particular page, often with conditions on anchor text, link attributes and how long it stays live. Unlike an earned editorial mention, there is a counterparty who can be asked to fix a problem, and frequently a guarantee window during which removals are replaced or refunded. Monitoring turns those terms into something checkable.

Google's position frames what to watch. Its guidance on qualifying outbound links asks publishers to mark advertisements and paid placements with rel="sponsored", and its spam policies treat buying or selling links that pass ranking credit as link spam. A monitor does not enforce either rule; it reports the attributes the publisher actually used, so the buyer knows what was delivered. The attribute values themselves are explained on nofollow, sponsored and ugc on backlinks.

The delivery check

The first check happens when the seller reports the link live. It should confirm every term of the order:

A discrepancy found on day one is the cheapest one to fix. Sellers expect delivery questions; the same question months later often goes unanswered.

During the guarantee window

Paid placements are removed for ordinary reasons: the publisher sells the site, prunes old sponsored posts, changes CMS, or reacts to a policy change. Removal often happens without notice. Through the guarantee window, re-check on a fast cadence so any loss is detected while the seller still owes a replacement.

Directive changes deserve equal attention. A sponsored section can be put behind a site-wide noindex rule or a robots.txt disallow without any edit to the article. The link is still present in both cases, so a presence-only check passes while the placement stops doing what was paid for.

Indexation of the source page

Many paid placements sit on pages that are never indexed, especially on sites that publish a large volume of sponsored posts. The buyer pays for a link that Google may never weigh. Checking source page indexation after a reasonable settling period separates two cases: the page was not discovered yet, which a crawl submission can address, or it was crawled and left out, which is a quality issue with the site.

The IndexChex backlink monitor records link presence, rel values, robots.txt access for Googlebot, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag, the declared canonical and the source page's indexation status on each run. Where a crawlable source page is unindexed, the same account can submit it for crawling; IndexChex guarantees Googlebot crawls submitted URLs, but not that Google indexes them.

Keeping evidence

Disputes with sellers are settled with records, not recollection. Useful evidence is:

• The original order terms and delivery report.
• The dated delivery check.
• The first check showing the change, with the observed HTTP status or missing anchor.
• A manual confirmation where the automated result was incomplete.

A check that could not see the page, such as an anti-bot block, is not evidence of removal and should not be cited as such. The codes that do and do not count as evidence are listed in the outcome code reference.

When a paid link fails

Follow the order of recovering a lost backlink: confirm, identify the cause, contact the seller within the guarantee window, and record the outcome. A seller who replaces links promptly is worth noting for future orders; one who does not is equally worth noting. Over a year, this record is the most practical output of backlink monitoring for anyone buying links, and it feeds directly into the routine described in backlink health checks.