Managed link acquisition with the placement evidence attached

Every link we place arrives with four things attached: the live URL, the rel attribute as the page actually served it, the publishing site's organic traffic on the day the link went live, and the outreach thread that produced it. That is the deliverable. It exists because link programmes rarely fail on quality. They fail the first time a new VP of Marketing asks where the links came from and nobody in the building can answer. Who does the work: Pitches are written and sent by one of the two partners at Anchor & Cable. There is no account coordinator between you and the editor, and no shared inbox firing the same template at four hundred addresses. The partner who convinces a publication to link to you is the same person on your monthly call, so the answer to why one fell through is an actual answer rather than a status colour. Both of us worked in-house before this, on the receiving end of link reports we could not defend to a CFO. In 2024 we told a payments client to shut down a guest-post programme we had built for them ourselves, because the sites accepting those posts had started selling the same slots to their two closest competitors. It cost us the retainer for a quarter. It was the right call and we would make it again. The question this answers: Which publishers will link to you on the strength of what already exists on your site, and what has to be built before the rest will. Those are two different lists and you get both inside the first three weeks. If the second list is longer than the first, the campaign starts slowly, and we say that before you sign rather than in month three. When the answer is inconvenient: Sometimes the honest finding is that there is nothing on your site an editor would cite. A product page and a pricing page are not a reason for a journalist to link to you. When that is the case we say so and recommend the money goes to whoever writes your content for a quarter first. We have ended three engagements early on that basis in the last four years and returned the unused balance each time. What is not included: We do not write your content, fix your internal linking, rebuild your templates or run your press office. We do not buy from marketplace inventory that resells the same domain to your competitor a fortnight later. No expired domains, no private networks, no site-wide footer placements, no reciprocal swaps. Where a publisher has a published rate card and you approve the spend in writing, we pay it and the invoice reaches you unmarked up. Where a price is quoted only over email by an intermediary, we walk away. Anchor text is capped. Exact-match commercial anchors stay under thirty percent of the profile we build, and we do not raise that cap on request. If your brief requires it, we are the wrong agency and will say so on the first call. What counts as delivered: A placement counts when it is live, crawlable, followed unless we flagged the alternative in advance, and sitting on a page that has been indexed. We re-check every link at thirty and ninety days. Anything removed inside ninety days is replaced at no charge. After ninety days it is not, because a publisher's later editorial decisions are outside anyone's control, and pretending otherwise is how agencies end up padding reports. Who this is not for: Sites that launched this quarter with a dozen pages. Companies that need a fixed number of links by a board date. Anyone in gambling, adult, or unlicensed supplements. Buyers who want to dictate the anchor list. Teams whose real problem is a replatform next month, where anything built now points at URLs that are about to change: come back once the redirect map is signed off. The commercial case: Work at this level is defensive at least as often as it is offensive. A category page sitting third, earning a figure your finance team already knows, is revenue you can lose within two quarters if two competitors keep acquiring and you stop. Before we start, we tell you which of your pages are in that position. If none of them are, we tell you that instead, and the sensible move is to spend the budget elsewhere this year.