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In practice
The lifetime curve has two humps. The durable hump: placements on publications with editorial standards, real audiences and maintenance — links inside content the publisher has a reason to keep — survive redesigns, cleanup passes and years of algorithm updates, and appreciate as the pages accumulate their own authority. The decay hump: placements on sites built to sell links — whose traffic declines, whose inventories churn, whose whole domains get deindexed — lose their links within months, in correlated batches when the sweep arrives.
Between them sits the ordinary attrition: publishers redesign, articles get pruned, sites get sold — a slow baseline decay that monitoring catches and replacements cover. The buyer’s economics: the price per placement is only comparable when divided by expected lifetime — a cheap link lasting four months costs more per working month than a flat-fee placement lasting years with free replacement inside the guarantee.
The programme design that extends lifetime: the quality floor (the single strongest predictor), the content standard (placements that read as content survive cleanups; placements that read as ads don’t), the monitoring (detection within weeks, replacement within the guarantee) and the target-page maintenance (links to live, current pages survive publisher prunings that remove links to dead ones). The reporting that closes it: survival rate per cohort (placements from each quarter, still live this quarter) — the metric that shows whether the programme is buying assets or renting numbers, and the one that makes vendor comparisons honest.
See also: Link rot and link churn, Backlink monitoring and link tracking, Deindexation risk of publisher sites.
Related service: Link insertions.
