Link Insertions We Will Actually Defend in Writing

We turn down more of this work than we accept, and the line is drawn in one place: we will not arrange a link insertion on a page that gives clinical guidance. No pharma. No medtech. Nothing on a page that tells a reader how to treat a condition, dose anything, or decide against seeing a doctor. What is left is real and worth doing, and it is where this engagement operates: food and beverage, nutrition reference content, ingredient and sourcing explainers, and category pages in general wellness. Our position on paid insertions: Google's link spam policy names paid link insertion as manipulation, in those words, and the enforcement in the March 2024 spam update was aimed at exactly this pattern. So the question is never whether the insertion is undetectable. It is whether the link would survive a human reviewer reading the paragraph around it and concluding that the citation belongs there. That is a judgement, it cannot be made from a spreadsheet of URLs, and it is the entire reason this costs what it costs. When an insertion is defensible: The page makes a factual claim that currently cites nothing, or cites something weaker than what you have published. Your page is the better source. The link is placed in the sentence making the claim, with anchor text that describes the destination the way a writer would write it, not the way a rank tracker would. If we cannot find that sentence in the target article, there is no insertion to make, and we do not offer to have one written in. Publisher terms we require: The editor updates the article's modified date and adds a line saying it was updated, because a silently altered five-year-old article is the signature of the network version of this tactic. The insertion goes in through the CMS by the publication's own editorial staff. The page is not part of a subfolder rented to a third party. And the publisher tells us plainly whether other links in the article were paid for, because a paragraph carrying four commercial insertions devalues yours regardless of how good yours is. What we refuse: Bulk inventory lists. Any site quoting a per-insertion price sheet across a hundred domains. Insertions into roundups and best-of listicles, which get resold repeatedly and turn over. Exact-match anchors on commercial terms. Insertions on pages already carrying an affiliate disclosure for a competing product. And any arrangement where the publisher will not tell us who edits the site. Reporting and durability: Every insertion is recorded with the URL, the paragraph before and after the change, the anchor text, the rel attributes as rendered, the editor's name and the date. We recheck each link at 30, 90 and 180 days for removal, for a nofollow added after the fact, and for the article being unpublished or redirected, which happens more often than the industry admits. Anything that drops is reported to you rather than quietly replaced. Not for you if: You want a monthly quota. Placements meeting the standard above appear at an uneven rate and some months produce very few. This is also wrong for you if your budget assumes a per-link unit price, because the review work is the same whether a target passes or fails and most of them fail. And it is wrong if your published content is not actually a better citation than what the target article already links to, in which case the money should go into the content first and we will tell you so during the assessment rather than after you have paid for placements.