LinkThe short version
- Write down every link you paid for: page, landing page, anchor, price, date, vendor.
- Decide what "still fine" means: seven checks per link.
- Pick how to run them: by hand, with the alerts of an SEO suite, or with a monitor that takes your list.
- Set it up once, then act on the alerts.
If you buy links, you already do the hard parts: finding sites, negotiating, paying. What usually gets skipped is the cheap part, checking that the links are still there next quarter. This tutorial sets that up in about 15 minutes.
Step 1: Make the list
Everything starts with one row per link. Pull the rows from order confirmations, invoices and the vendor's delivery emails. You need:
| Column | Example | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Page you paid for | https://blog.example.com/best-tools-2026 | The address to fetch. |
| Landing page | yoursite.com/pricing | What the link must point to. |
| Anchor | invoice software | To notice when an editor changes it. |
| Price and currency | 180 EUR | To know what a broken link costs. |
| Paid until | 2027-06-30, or permanent | To renew or renegotiate in time. |
| Vendor | name and email | Who to write to when it breaks. |
Do not worry about a perfect format. A messy export is fine as long as the first two columns are right.
Step 2: Know what you are checking
A link is fine when all of these are true. If one fails, the link is at risk or dead.
- The page loads. Not a 404, not a redirect to the home page.
- The link is in the HTML the server sends, as a normal
<a href>. - The rel is what you agreed. No nofollow, sponsored or ugc that was not part of the deal.
- The page is open to search engines. No noindex and no page-wide nofollow, in the meta tag or in the
X-Robots-Tagheader. - The canonical points to the page itself.
- The anchor is the one you ordered.
- Google can find the page. A slower signal, worth a look once a month.
Each of these is explained, with how to test it by hand, in how to check a paid backlink.
Step 3: Choose how to run the checks
| By hand | SEO suite alerts | A monitor with your list | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works from your list of pages | Yes | No, from the suite's index | Yes |
| How soon you hear | When you next look | When the suite recrawls the page | The next daily check |
| Nofollow, noindex, canonical | If you look for them | Varies by suite | Yes |
| Knows what you paid | If it is in your sheet | Rarely | Yes |
| Cost | Your time | From about $100 a month | From a few dollars a month |
| Practical up to | 20 to 30 links | Any number | Thousands |
The alerts in a suite such as Ahrefs are built for a different question: which links did my domain gain or lose. They watch your site, not a list of pages, and they notice a change when the suite next crawls that page. Keep them for links you did not place. For links you bought, use one of the other two columns.
Step 4a: The manual setup
- Put the list in a spreadsheet and add three columns: last checked, result, next step.
- Set a weekly reminder.
- Each week, paste the pages into the free check, five at a time, with your site as the target. It covers checks 1 to 5 and reads the anchor.
- Once a month, search Google for
site:plus the page address for each link. - Write the result in the sheet. When something fails, follow the recovery steps.
This is honest work and it costs nothing. It also depends on you doing it every week, which is where it usually ends.
Step 4b: The setup with LinkRot.io
LinkRot.io is our tool, built for exactly this list. The setup:
- Open an account on the plan that fits your list: 300 links on Starter, 2,000 on Pro. There is a 14-day refund if it is not for you.
- Import the list. On the dashboard choose Import and paste your rows or upload the CSV. Columns can be in any order and the prices in any currency. A placement with links to several of your pages goes in one row.
- Review and save. You see the rows as LinkRot.io read them and can fix any before saving.
- Let the first check run. Each link is fetched once right away. The anchor it finds on this first successful check becomes the agreed anchor.
- Choose your alerts under Settings: an email the moment a link breaks plus a digest, or the digest only. Pick the day, the hour and your time zone for the digest.
- Read the health card. It shows how much of what you paid is rotting right now, in your currency, split into healthy, at risk, dead and unverified. Under it, "Fix first" lists the broken links by price, each with its next step.
From then on it checks every link each day and looks each page up in Google once a month. Two things keep the alerts trustworthy: a healthy link is only called dead after a second failed check an hour later, and a page that answers with a bot wall or a server error is marked unreachable, not dead.
Step 5: Act on what you hear
An alert is only worth something if it leads to an email to the vendor. When a link breaks:
- Open the page and confirm what the alert says.
- Write to the vendor the same day, with the page, what changed and a date. Templates are in how to find and recover lost backlinks.
- Check again on that date. If the anchor changed and you are happy with the new one, accept it by saving the link in Edit.
- Two weeks before a paid term ends, decide whether to renew. LinkRot.io reminds you if you entered the date.
Frequently asked questions
How do I monitor backlinks?
Keep a list of the pages that link to you, with the landing page and the anchor you expect. Fetch each page on a schedule and compare: is the link still in the HTML, is its rel unchanged, is the page still open to search engines. Do it by hand for a few links, or let a monitor do it daily.
How often should backlinks be checked?
Daily if a tool does it, weekly at the least if you do it by hand. The point of monitoring is to hear about a change while the vendor still treats it as a mistake to fix.
Can I monitor backlinks for free?
Yes, for a short list. A spreadsheet plus the free check, the dofollow checker and the noindex checker covers it, five pages at a time. It stops being practical somewhere past twenty or thirty links.
Does Google Search Console monitor backlinks?
No. Its Links report shows a sample of links Google has found over time. It has no alerts, does not say whether a link is nofollow, and may list links that have since been removed.
What is the difference between backlink monitoring and backlink checking?
A backlink checker finds the links that point to a site, usually from a crawled index. A backlink monitor watches specific links you already know about and tells you when one changes. Link buyers need the second.