How do I check if a backlink is still live?

Load the page and confirm it returns a 200 status and that the link is present in the rendered page, with the right target and rel attribute. A crawler or monitoring tool can do this on a schedule. Repeat the check with a Googlebot user agent to catch cloaking.

How do I know if a backlink is indexed?

Search Google for the exact URL restricted to its own site, or use a URL-level index checker. Both are approximations, because you cannot inspect a page in Search Console unless you own the site.

How long does a backlink take to work?

In Editorial.link's 2026 survey, 57.1% of SEOs said one to three months and 33% said three to six. Measure from the date the linking page is indexed, not from the date you paid.

What should I do when a link is removed?

If it was a paid placement inside its guarantee period, claim a replacement from the publisher or vendor within a week and log the incident. If it was earned, ask the editor politely whether it can be restored.

How to track backlinks and measure what they do

Building a link is half the job. Pages get deleted, attributes change to nofollow, articles slip out of the index and publishers sell out to link farms. If you do not check, you will report links that no longer exist. An Ahrefs study cited in our research found that about two thirds of links disappear over nine years. We have not re-checked that figure, so treat it as indicative.

Tracking has two parts: confirming the link is still what you paid for or earned, and working out whether it did anything.

What to record for every link

Keep one row per link. These fields are the minimum.

Group	Fields
Identity	Link ID, campaign, method, vendor
Money	Cost, currency, order date, guarantee end date, replacement claimed
Where	Source URL, source domain, target URL, placement in the page (body, bio or sidebar)
Link details	Anchor, rel value, whether the article is labelled as sponsored
Publisher metrics	DR, organic traffic of the domain, traffic of the page, traffic country
Technical state	HTTP status, indexed with date, canonical correct, robots correct
Status	Live date, last checked, current status, notes

Status should be one of live, lost, changed, noindexed or redirected. Record who approved each link and keep the evidence, such as a screenshot and an archive snapshot from the day it went live.

The first 48 hours

Before payment is released, check:

The URL is live, returns 200 and sits on the agreed domain and section.
The link is present in the rendered page, with the correct target, anchor and rel value, and with no redirect chain.
There is no noindex tag, the canonical is correct, and neither robots.txt nor an X-Robots-Tag header blocks the page.
The page looks the same when fetched with a Googlebot user agent. A difference means cloaking.
The article can be reached through internal links and is in the sitemap or a category page.
No competitor or restricted-niche links have been added alongside yours.

If the link is missing or wrong, return it to the publisher and hold payment.

Checks and cadence

Check	How	How often
Live status: 200 response and link present in rendered page	Crawler or monitoring tool, plus a Googlebot user agent check	Weekly for three months, then monthly
Attribute change, such as followed to nofollow or sponsored	Monitoring tool comparison	Weekly
Anchor or target URL change	Comparison against the tracker	Weekly
Indexation of the source page	URL-level index check	Day 7, 14 and 30, then quarterly
Noindex, canonical, robots.txt, X-Robots-Tag	Crawler	With each live check
Page orphaned or archived, or outbound links multiplying	Manual sample	Quarterly
Publisher health: traffic collapse, deindexing, turned into a link farm	Traffic trend in Ahrefs or Semrush	Quarterly
Lost links across the whole profile	Lost links report in Ahrefs or Semrush, Search Console links export	Monthly
New unknown links, such as scrapers or negative SEO	Tool alerts	Weekly

Indexation

A link on a page Google has not indexed passes nothing. Pages on weak sites often stay out of the index for weeks, or for good.

You cannot use Search Console to inspect a page on a site you do not own. Search Google for the exact URL restricted to its site, or use a third-party index checker. Both are approximations. The Search Console links report on your own site is also only a sample of the links Google knows about.

A workable sequence when a page is not indexed:

Day 7, 14 and 30: check.
Day 14: ask the publisher to link the article from a category page or the homepage and to include it in the sitemap.
Day 21: consider an indexing service, and only one that refunds URLs it fails to index.
Day 45: claim a replacement or refund under the guarantee.

Indexing services can prompt a crawl. They cannot make Google keep a poor page in the index, and our research found no independent large-sample test of them in 2026. If a paid placement needs an indexer at all, that tells you something about the publisher.

When a link is lost or changed

What happened	What to do	Deadline
Link not live or wrong at the first check	Return to the publisher or vendor and hold payment	48 hours
Page not indexed at day 45	Claim a replacement or refund	7 days
Link removed, switched to nofollow, or page noindexed inside the guarantee	Claim a replacement and log a strike against the vendor	7 days
Publisher’s traffic falls by more than 70%, or the site is deindexed	Stop buying from it and assess the links you already have	14 days
Sudden spike of unknown links	Document it and watch rankings. Disavow only with evidence of harm	72 hours

These deadlines are a working standard for a team, not an industry rule. A common convention is that three strikes remove a vendor from the approved list.

Tools

Ahrefs and Semrush both report new and lost links and send alerts. Majestic, Linkody, Monitor Backlinks, LinkChecker Pro, Linkbox and BacklinkManager are dedicated monitors. WhitePress includes a backlink manager that monitors orders placed through its marketplace. Screaming Frog in list mode, with custom extraction, will check a list of source URLs for your link. Our SE Ranking desk review covers its backlink tracker. We could not verify current pricing for the dedicated monitors, so check it before you choose.

Measuring impact

At page level. Watch rankings and clicks for the keyword group of the target URL over the 4 to 12 weeks after the linking page is indexed. Annotate the live dates in your rank tracker and Search Console exports. Compare against control pages that received no links in the same period.

At domain level. Track growth in referring domains against competitors, the share of links going to commercial against informational pages, and the anchor mix.

In business terms. Track organic revenue per target page. A useful figure is cost per incremental organic click: link spend divided by the extra clicks gained over 12 months.

As a ceiling. BuzzStream suggests a cap on what a link campaign is worth: the monthly traffic value of the target keywords multiplied by 24 months.

In AI answers. Brand mentions and citations in AI assistants can be tracked with tools such as Ahrefs Brand Radar and the Semrush AI toolkit. In BuzzStream’s State of Digital PR 2026 survey, 55.4% of digital PRs reported AI citations as a success measure.

The caveat is that you can rarely pin a ranking change on one link. Other links, content changes and Google updates all move at the same time. Judge batches, not single placements.

What to report

Report unique referring domains, not raw links. Exclude syndicated copies of the same article. Show nofollow links and unlinked mentions separately. Never report DR on its own. Add durability: the share of links still live and indexed at 90 and 365 days.

Where to go next

The roles that own these checks are set out in link building team roles and KPIs. For the rules on strikes, guarantees and escalation, see link buying policy and governance.