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In practice
Monitoring is the unglamorous half that decides whether money spent keeps working. Links vanish for ordinary reasons: the publisher redesigns the site, prunes old articles, or quietly retargets the link to their own page; occasionally the whole domain dies. None of this announces itself — the campaign’s total keeps looking fine in a stale report while the live count decays underneath.
A monitoring setup needs four checks per placement, run on a schedule: the link is still present at the recorded URL, it still points at the exact agreed target (not a redirected or swapped destination), the page is still indexed, and the anchor is unchanged. Every result is logged with the placement’s metadata — publisher, target page, placement type, fee flag, go-live date — so the tracker is auditable rather than a summary. When a removal is detected, the workflow is immediate: contact the publisher, and where the guarantee covers it, replace the placement free within the agreed window.
Reporting follows from the tracker: go-lives and removals per month, live links by placement type and market, and — for AI-facing placements — the presence data from prompt monitoring alongside. The discipline also protects against vendor theatre: a report whose links cannot be traced to a live URL is not a report. Twelve months of monitoring per placement is a reasonable commercial standard; beyond that, a light quarterly sweep catches the long tail of decays.
See also: Monthly reporting and go-live tracking, Replacement workflow when links drop, Placement lifetime.
Checklist: Link Insertion Campaign.
Related service: Link building strategy.
