Link Programme Governance for In-House Marketing Teams

On the first audit of an inherited programme we normally reject between a fifth and a third of what the previous quarter's vendors delivered. Not because the links are toxic — mostly they are not — but because they sit on pages with no editor, no readers and no reason to exist, and somebody paid for each one without opening it. What the retainer covers: Direction of everything acquiring links in your name, whoever is doing it: your in-house writer, the two outreach vendors, the corporate PR firm, and us. One acceptance policy, one target URL map, one anchor plan, one report that goes to the board. The acceptance policy: A written document every vendor signs before invoicing. A domain without a named editor or a masthead does not qualify. Placement cost, where there is one, is disclosed to us before publication rather than after. Target URL and anchor are decided here, not offered by the vendor. No placement on a site that also sells placements to your competitors in the same month. No links from sites in a language neither your buyers nor your team read. And every candidate URL is opened and read by a person here before it is accepted or paid for. What gets measured monthly: Referring domains new to the profile, not total link count. Indexation of each placement page, checked rather than assumed. Whether the link sits in body copy or in a footer block. The rel attribute. And decay: everything acquired in the past twelve months is re-crawled each month, and eight to fifteen per cent of it disappears within a year in these sectors, which is a number your forecast has to contain rather than discover. Cost per accepted link, by vendor: This is the number the retainer exists to produce. It turns a renewal decision into a five-minute conversation instead of a quarter of arguing, and it is why we have twice recommended a client cut spend on a channel we were running ourselves. On disavow: We file under two conditions only: a manual action, or a documented history of purchased links from a previous agency that we can enumerate line by line. Otherwise the file does nothing Google's own handling is not already doing, and every inherited disavow we have reviewed contained domains that were perfectly fine and should never have been in it. What we will not manage: A vendor who will not disclose a placement URL before it publishes, or will not say whether money changed hands. A monthly link target written into a plan. A programme aimed at pages nobody on the marketing team has read. And we do not sign off on a link we have not opened, which puts a deliberate ceiling on how much of this can run at once. Who this is for, and who it is not: It is for a head of growth or a marketing director with three or more sources of links and no single view across them, usually after an audit found something awkward. It is not for a company with one vendor and a working relationship — you do not need a layer above that, and we will tell you so. And it is not a coordination service. If what you want is somebody to chase deliverables and reconcile invoices, that person is cheaper in-house. How it starts: Four weeks of audit before any direction is given. Every link acquired in the previous twelve months, opened and classified. Every vendor contract read, including the notice periods. The target URL map rebuilt against what actually ranks rather than what the brief said. Then the policy, then the programme.