Link Program Management for In-House Teams

This is the engagement where we run the program and you keep the team. The usual shape is a content lead, one or two outreach vendors already under contract, and nobody senior enough to tell a vendor that the placement it has just invoiced is a paid insert with the disclosure taken out. Every delivered domain is audited before it is approved for payment, and in a first quarter we normally reject between a fifth and a third of what arrives. The qualification standard: It is one page, it is written before anything is commissioned, and a domain either meets it or it does not. Does the site publish or quietly operate a rate card. Do its writers exist anywhere else on the internet. Is the outbound link profile dominated by commercial anchors from unrelated sectors. Is the placing page still indexed thirty days after publication, which is the check almost nobody runs and the one that separates a placement from a receipt. Your vendors receive the standard on day one, together with the requirement to name the domain before publication rather than after. Vendor governance: We do not take a percentage of vendor spend and we do not set a monthly link quota. A quota is how a vendor ends up buying links: it converts judgement into a number somebody has to reach by the thirtieth, and the cheapest way to reach it is always the one you would not have approved. Vendors are scored quarterly on qualified placements, rejection rate and how well they argued the rejections. Two consecutive quarters below the line and we recommend ending the contract in writing, with the evidence attached, so the conversation is about a record rather than a feeling. Anchors and pacing: Most of a healthy month's new links carry brand or bare-URL anchors, because that is what a link looks like when nobody negotiated it. Exact-match commercial anchor text is held to a minority share of new links and tracked against the specific pages it points at. Acquisition is also paced against publishing: a page earning links faster than the site produces anything worth linking to is a pattern, and patterns get looked at before somebody else looks at them. Reporting and the disavow question: A monthly ledger of every link the program produced with its qualification note, read alongside Search Console data for the target pages through the API. Domain Rating movement is not reported as a result. It is a vendor's model of a search engine, not the search engine, and a program optimised for it drifts toward domains that score well and refer nobody. On disavow: Google's own guidance is that most sites never need the file. We use it for a manual action or a documented negative campaign, and we will not sell you a quarterly disavow as maintenance. Who this is not for: Teams who want an agency to absorb the blame for a link profile they intend to keep buying. If the decision to use a vendor we have disqualified gets made anyway, we document it once and then step out of the program rather than sign the reporting. It is also the wrong engagement if nobody in-house produces content, because governance over an empty pipeline is administration. What changes in the first ninety days: The standard exists and vendors have signed up to it. Pre-publication disclosure becomes the condition of payment. The ledger replaces whatever spreadsheet was in use. And somebody who does not report to your CMO is willing to say a placement is not acceptable.