Every marketplace guarantees links. Ask who does the noticing.
FatJoe says lifetime. PressWhizz says twelve months. Collaborator gives three months free and a year if you pay extra. All four are the same product: if you notice your link has gone, and you write in, somebody will try to replace it. The noticing is your job. Here, a reader fetches the page every night, and the money moves on what it finds whether or not anybody complains.
What the term is
The term is whatever the listing says, and it is on the listing before you buy — some publishers sell a link for a year, some sell it permanently, and both are enforced the same way. What does not vary is the mechanism: the page is read every night for the whole term, and every reading is on your order screen with its date.
What happens when a link comes down
- The night it happens — the reading records it and the publisher is told. Not a support ticket: the reader found it before either of you looked.
- 7 days to put it back — publishers break links by accident constantly, a redesign or a plugin does it, and a marketplace that reverses payment the same night is one no publisher will list on.
- Then the money moves on its own — the publisher keeps the share of the term the link actually stood for and the rest comes back to you, with a floor of 25% so a link that stood almost the whole term is not treated as a total failure.
Nobody writes to anybody. The refund is arithmetic on readings that are already on the screen, which is the only reason it can happen without a person deciding it should.
What it does not cover
- Nights we could not read the page. A publisher whose host blocks us, or who was down, is not charged for our reach. Unreadable nights never count against them and never count as a failure.
- Rankings. The link standing exactly as sold is what is guaranteed. Whether it moves your page is between Google and your page — we will show you the position next to the link’s own dates, and we will not pretend to guarantee it.
- A link you asked to be changed. Approving a different anchor after publication is a new agreement, not a breach of the old one.
Cover, when you want more than a refund
A refund returns what you paid. It does not return the 365 days you expected the link to be working. On donors we have watched long enough to price, you can buy cover at checkout: if the link comes down inside its term and is not restored within 7days, we pay the difference on top of the refund. The premium comes from that donor’s own removal rate over our readings — not from a rate card — and it is refused outright on donors we have not watched enough to price honestly.
The mechanism in full is on how escrow works, and every reading behind any of it is readable through the API.