Link Building Programme Management and Supplier Governance

This is the seat that decides which links your suppliers get paid for. You already have vendors, an in-house writer and a backlog of outreach. What is usually missing is one person with the authority to reject a batch, retire a supplier, and tell the board why the number went down deliberately. The nine checks: Every placement is reviewed before it is approved for payment. Whether the exact URL is indexed, tested with a site query rather than assumed. Whether the linking page itself has organic traffic, not just the domain. Whether the page sits inside the site's own internal link graph or is orphaned in a category no menu reaches. Outbound external link count on the page. Whether the site publicly advertises paid posts. Topical fit, judged by somebody who has read the page. Language and market matched to the target URL. The rel attribute as delivered against what was promised. Domain history checked in the Wayback Machine for the expired-domain flip. Two failures and the placement is rejected and charged back. Anchor policy: Exact-match commercial anchors stay under roughly eight percent of the followed profile on any single money page, and we watch the rate of change more closely than the absolute figure. A page moving from two percent to fifteen in a quarter is the pattern that draws attention; a steady figure is not. Brand, bare URL and generic anchors are the majority by design. We will overrule a supplier who wants the keyword in the anchor because it makes their own reporting look better. What management means here: A quarterly plan naming the specific URLs that need links and why, usually four to eight pages rather than the whole catalogue. Forecasts expressed in linking root domains per priority page, with a range and a stated confidence, never a single number. A supplier scorecard covering accepted, rejected, cost per accepted domain and time from brief to live. Monthly reporting written to be pasted straight into your board deck, losses included, with removed links kept in the record rather than quietly dropped from it. Kill criteria agreed in advance, so retiring a channel is a decision taken in January and executed in April instead of an argument in May. Conflict rule: We take no commission, rebate or referral fee from any supplier, and that is written into the contract. If we are also running your press work or your study, we do not grade our own output. Either an external reviewer of your choosing receives the same scorecard, or we sit purely on the management side. You choose which. We will not mark our own homework and then invoice you for the mark. Out of scope: We do not buy links, broker placements or introduce you to a network. We do not write the content your suppliers produce. We do not manage your internal linking or your technical backlog beyond flagging where a target page cannot hold the links being sent to it. Who this is wrong for: Programmes under roughly eight thousand euros a month in supplier spend. The governance costs more than it saves and you should run it yourself from our rulebook, which we will sell you on its own. Also wrong: teams who need the number to rise regardless of what sits behind it. The first quarter under management usually shows fewer new domains than the quarter before, because a share of what was previously being counted does not pass the checks. If that reads as failure inside your company rather than as the entire point, this will be an unpleasant engagement for both of us. Reporting cadence: Monthly in writing, quarterly on a call with whoever owns the budget. We would rather present to the person who signs than to a channel lead who then has to re-present it upward without the context.