How long a bought link actually lasts

I started keeping a written record of every link sitting on my sites for other people in July of this year. Buyer, date, page, destination, what I promised. Before that there was nothing.

The reason I started is that a site I own had lost 334 articles. Deleted at some point, returning 404 by the time a crawl found them. Any bought or swapped link that lived on one of those pages went with it, and I could not tell you which ones, because the list did not exist yet.

Nobody got an email. There was no one to email.

That is the honest shape of this market. You pay a purchase price for something that behaves like a rental, and the landlord has no obligation to tell you when the building comes down.

Five ways it dies, in the order they happen

Ranked by how often I have watched each one, both on sites I own and on placements I bought.

The page gets deleted. Usually in a content cull that had nothing to do with you. Somebody decides the thin archive is dragging the domain down and clears out a few hundred posts in a weekend.

The rel attribute changes. A theme update, a plugin that starts stamping outbound links sitewide, a new person deciding everything commercial gets marked from now on. Your sentence is untouched and your link stopped passing anything months back.

The article gets rewritten. A two year old guide gets refreshed and trimmed, and your paragraph is one of the ones that did not survive the edit. The URL is fine. The page may rank better than before. You are just no longer in it.

The site changes hands. Stripping outbound links is one of the first jobs a lot of acquirers do, and they do it in an afternoon without knowing anyone paid for any of it.

The domain lapses. Rarest of the five, despite being the one buyers ask about most. Expired, parked, or bought at auction and turned into something you would rather not have your brand next to.

Not one of those five sends you a notification.

Why a 200 response proves nothing

Here is the mechanical reason link decay is invisible.

A page with your link surgically removed still returns 200. A page where your dofollow became a nofollow still returns 200. A page rewritten from scratch around the space where you used to be still returns 200.

So status code monitoring, which is what most people mean when they say they monitor their links, confirms that the seller’s web server is up. It has never checked whether you are on it. I have met people two years into that habit who felt organised about it, and whose placement had been gone since the first quarter.

The check, in the order I run it

Under a minute per link once it is scripted, and every step catches a different failure.

Fetch the page and search the raw HTML for your destination URL. Not the rendered page you skim in a browser tab. The source. The string is either present or it is absent, and there is no judgement involved.

Find that anchor and read its rel attribute. This is the step people skip and it is the one that catches the quiet downgrade. noopener is a security attribute and passes value normally. nofollow, sponsored or ugc means you are holding a mention. All of them look identical to a human eye reading the page.

Read the anchor text while you are in there. It drifts. Someone edits a sentence for flow and the phrase you negotiated becomes the word “here”.

Check the page is still indexable. A noindex added during a cleanup takes the page out of the equation while leaving your link sitting on it in plain sight, which is a particularly annoying way to own nothing.

Check the destination too, if the placement is old enough. I have found links on my own pages pointing at partners whose companies had been acquired and whose domains now resolved somewhere unrelated. That reflects on the page hosting the link, which is you when you are the seller.

Redirects are the expensive category

A page that quietly started redirecting is worse than a dead one, because everything about it reads as healthy.

The chain ends in a 200. Your crawler is satisfied. A human clicking through lands somewhere that loads and looks fine. Meanwhile your link is either pointing at a consolidated page it was never bought for, or it got dropped in the merge and you are counting an asset that ended at the redirect.

When I audited outbound links on my own properties I found several of these. None of them disasters. All of them live and wrong for months, invisible to every automated check that only counts failures.

The interval I actually keep

At 30 days for the first check. The earliest failure window is unglamorous: a placement that goes live, then gets pulled or edited within the first month because somebody more senior looked at the page afterwards.

Quarterly through the first year. Twice a year after that, for as long as you are still counting the link as an asset.

That schedule comes from what I can sustain across a ledger without it eating a day, and I am not going to dress it up as research. A check you keep running every six months beats a monthly one abandoned in March.

Log the result with the date even when nothing changed. The value is the history. When a link does vanish, the last clean check tells you roughly when it happened, which is the difference between a specific conversation with the seller and a shrug.

The clause worth five minutes of awkwardness

Almost nobody asks about duration at the point of sale, because you are trying to close and it feels rude. Ask anyway. One line in an email is enough.

How long is this expected to stay up. What happens if it comes down inside that window. Will you tell me if the page gets rewritten or pruned.

Pin the position if position matters. The one placement I have sold with a genuine term attached specifies twelve months, no rotation, and a named slot on the page. I wrote all three down the day it closed because I knew I would forget, and eleven months later a routine rewrite would have breached a deal somebody paid me real money for without anyone noticing.

Then settle what replacement means before you need it. An equivalent page on the same site is replacement. Being dropped into a roundup assembled that morning is not, and that is what gets offered.

None of it survives the site being sold. A new owner inherits the domain and not the correspondence, so a term protects you against the seller changing their mind and does nothing against the seller leaving.

Refunds are usually the worse outcome

People ask for their money back and think they won.

You got some months of value, you now have a hole where a link used to be, and you are back at the start of a sourcing process that took weeks the first time. The cash is the smallest thing you lost. Ask for replacement on comparable material first and keep the refund as the fallback.

What “permanent” tells you about the seller

The answer to “is it permanent” is worth more as a read on the person than as a fact about the link.

Anyone who says permanent flatly, with no qualification, has either never run a site through five years of platform changes or is saying what closes the deal. The answer I trust sounds more like: it stays as long as the page does, paid placements never get stripped by me, and if the page gets rewritten you will hear from me. That is somebody who has watched their own site change under them.

The rule I will argue about

A link you have not checked in six months does not belong in your count.

Not discounted. Not flagged. Out, until you have gone and looked. A count you have not verified is a count of things you bought once, which is a different object entirely from a count of things you have.

The objection is that this makes your profile look worse. It does. It looked that way the whole time and you were the one not looking.

Buy for duration, not for the score

If a placement is a rental, the only sensible unit is cost per year of survival, and you cannot know the denominator when you pay.

So price it as one year and treat everything after that as upside. A cheap link on a site that culls its archive annually is worse value than a dearer one on a site that has not deleted a page since 2019.

You can test that before you buy. Pull up their oldest indexed articles and see whether the archive from four years ago is still live and still maintained. That tells you more about how long your link will last than any authority score on a media kit does. Everything else I have worked out from both sides of these deals is here.