Editorial Corrections on Pages That Already Rank

I approach a publisher with a correction, not an order. Of the pages I screen against the criteria below, roughly one in five is worth approaching at all. The rest either rank for nothing with demand behind it, or carry health claims I will not place a client's name beside. The screen, before anyone is contacted: The page ranks in the top 20 for at least one query with real search demand, checked in the market that matters to you rather than globally. It is indexed on the day I check, verified live rather than from a tool's cache. It sits in a section with genuine topical adjacency, which for a device client means a clinical or device section and not a general business blog that once ran a health post. It carries no more than three existing commercial outbound links in the body, because the fourth is what turns a page into inventory. And the site has a named editorial contact willing to discuss a change on its merits. What actually gets inserted: A sentence that changes what the page says. The material exists in these categories in quantity: device explainers still describing the Medical Device Directive when Regulation 2017/745 replaced it in May 2021, nutrition pages using claim wording the EU Register never authorised, articles citing guidance since withdrawn or superseded, dosage and interaction content predating the current HPRA or EMA product information. The client link is the source for the correction rather than an ornament attached to it. Where I cannot find something genuinely out of date or incomplete on the page, I do not manufacture a reason to edit it. The risk, stated plainly: This is a paid link. Google's guidance treats paid links that pass ranking signals as a link scheme, and no framing of mine changes that. Keeping the volume low, the pages tightly relevant, the anchors dull and descriptive, and the placements on sites that would still run the correction unpaid reduces the exposure. It does not remove it. If your position is that you do not buy links, that is a defensible position and the digital PR engagement is the right conversation instead. I would rather you hold that view knowingly than discover later what was bought in your name. What I will not do: Insert into a page carrying an unsourced health claim, because the link then lives inside a document your regulatory team would have to defend. Insert into listicles already naming eight competitors. Use exact-match commercial anchors. Work with vendors who sell insertions by the batch and will not say who owns the site. Touch a domain whose ownership I cannot establish, which in this category is more of them than you would expect. Reporting: Every page screened and rejected, with the reason, because that list is the evidence you are being protected rather than sold to. For each placement: the URL, the correction made, the anchor, the publisher fee shown separately from my fee, and the page's ranking position on the day of placement. Re-checked at 90 days for removal, since a proportion of insertions quietly disappear and nobody who sold them ever mentions it. Who this is not for: Anyone who wants a monthly quota. Sites with a manual action or a history of one. Teams who intend to present this internally as earned coverage, because it is not earned coverage and I will not write the slide that says it is. Brands whose own page is thinner than the page they want to be cited from, where the publisher will notice before I do.