Link Insertions Editors Accept Without Being Paid

Of every 100 insertion requests sent from here, 18 to 30 come back accepted, and not one of them is paid for. The accepted ones have a single thing in common: the page is better after the change, and the editor can see that in the first two lines of the email. The three cases that justify asking: A dead citation. The article links to a study, a tool or a source that now returns 404 or redirects to a homepage. The Wayback capture shows what it used to say. Your page says the same thing or says it better, and the replacement is matched to the original claim rather than to your commercial priority. This case is accepted more often than anything else in this work. An unlinked mention. Your brand, your product or a figure you published is already named in the copy and simply not linked. Most of the time the writer meant to. A stale resource list. The page ranks, it lists eight options, two of them have shut down, and yours launched after the list was written. Everything else in this category is inventory: The standard offer is 150 to 600 euro to insert a link into an existing post, on sites that will insert one into any post for anyone who pays. That inventory trades in bulk, the pages have no readers, and the outbound history of the site tells the story to anyone who spends ten minutes reading it. I do not buy it. If your current provider is delivering forty insertions a month, that is what they are buying, and the invoice is not the risk. How targets are found: Screaming Frog crawls of the pages that rank for your target queries, checked for 404 outbound links and redirect chains. Ahrefs broken-backlink reports on dead competitor URLs and on retired tools in your space. Content Explorer and Search Console for mentions of your brand that carry no link. Every candidate page is checked for whether it actually receives search traffic before anyone is contacted, because an insertion into a page nobody reaches is a favour asked for nothing. Anchor text: Chosen from the sentence it sits in. I do not accept a keyword list from your agency. A commercial anchor dropped into somebody's four-year-old article is the clearest fingerprint of a paid insertion there is, and an editor who accepts one tends to start accepting them from everyone. Not included: Writing the replacement page. If a dead citation pointed at a statistic you do not publish, I will not commission a page that same week to fill the hole. That sequence is visible and it is a different project with a different budget. Also excluded: insertions into articles you placed as guest bylines, which people ask for and which converts an editorial relationship into a transaction you cannot undo. Reporting: Every request sent, the page, the case that was made, the reply, and the outcome. Accepted insertions are verified live, followed or not, and indexed, then re-checked at day 90 with removals reported by date. The acceptance rate goes in the report whether the month was good or bad, because a falling rate means the targeting is wrong and you should see that at the same time I do. Who this is not for: Anyone with a monthly quota. The volume is set by how many defensible cases exist in your space, which is twelve some months and three in others, and the correct response to a thin month is to send fewer requests rather than to lower the standard. If the number in the contract matters more than the pages the links sit on, a broker will serve you faster and for less.