Editorial Link Insertions on Pages That Already Rank

I decline most requests for this work, and the ones I take are usually unpaid. An insertion is defensible in a single situation: the page already ranks for the query, already discusses the thing you sell, and is missing a citation a careful editor would have added. In that situation editors often make the change for nothing when you write with the correction and the source. Everything else is a paid link in editorial costume, and in health it is a paid link on a page whose claims your brand now partly owns. How targets are found: By reading the SERP, not by buying a list. For each query that matters, the pages that rank and are stale in a checkable way: a nutrition explainer citing an EFSA opinion superseded at reassessment; a guidance page still quoting a withdrawn NICE recommendation; a comparison piece whose product table is two reformulations out of date; a dead link where the original resource moved. Reclamation of your own broken and unlinked mentions is worked in the same pass, because it is the same email to the same editor. The host page test: Organic traffic, not Domain Rating. Indexed, and confirmed as such rather than assumed. An outbound link audit on the page itself — if three unrelated commercial links have already been sold into it, the page is compromised and I will not add a fourth. Publishing history in Wayback, to see whether the site began selling insertions after an ownership change. Then a read of the paragraph: if the link only fits once the sentence is rewritten around it, it does not fit. What I ask the publisher for: The correction, with the source. Then, separately, the things editors usually grant in the same reply and which make the page better: an updated last-reviewed date, a named reviewer with a credential where the page carries health claims, and removal of the superseded figure rather than a link sitting awkwardly beside it. Where a fee proves unavoidable I tell you the amount before agreeing, the invoice reaches you at cost, and the link is marked accordingly — which means it has been bought for referral and relationship rather than for ranking. Refused outright: Insertion networks and any supplier offering a menu of sites. Pages already carrying sold links. Exact-match anchors; I propose the phrase the sentence wants and accept the editor's edit. Insertions into pages making health claims I cannot source, because your brand ends up standing next to them. Any arrangement a publisher will not put in writing. And bulk, which is the thing that killed this tactic everywhere else and the reason the careful version still works. Not for you if: You have been sold this before as a monthly volume and want the same shape at a higher price. You need results inside a month; editors answer correction emails on their own schedule and the ones worth having answer slowest. Or your category has no factually stale pages ranking, which happens more often than suppliers admit and which you will hear from me after the first week rather than at the end of the engagement. What you receive: The target list with the specific factual reason each page was approached, every email sent and its reply including the refusals, a before-and-after of each page that changed, live URLs with link attributes as published, and a short note on which correction arguments editors in your category actually respond to. That last part is the reusable asset, and your team can run it without me afterwards.