Nobody sells you link building on the basis that a share of what you buy will be gone in two years, but it will be. Publications close, editors prune, sites change owners, and content management systems get migrated by people who do not know what a permalink is.
The question is not whether decay happens. It is whether anyone notices, and whether the contract covers it.
Six causes
1. Editorial revision
An editor updates an old article, tightens it, and removes external links along the way. Nothing personal, no notification, and the most common cause we see.
Recoverable: sometimes. A polite note pointing out that the reference was useful occasionally works, particularly if you have a relationship.
2. Page pruning
Sites delete underperforming content to improve overall quality signals. Your placement lived on an article that got two hundred visits a year, and it is now a 404 or redirected to a category page.
Recoverable: rarely. If it redirected to something relevant, some value survives. If it 404s, the link is gone.
3. Site sold or shut down
The publication is acquired, merged or closed. Archives frequently do not survive the transition.
Recoverable: no.
4. Attribute change
The site adopts a policy of no-following all external links, or a new consultant decides outbound equity should be conserved. The link still exists and stops passing anything.
Recoverable: almost never — it is a sitewide policy, not a decision about you.
5. Migration damage
The publisher moves platform. URLs change, redirects are incomplete, and a portion of the archive is orphaned. This one produces sudden losses of many links at once from a single domain.
Recoverable: often, and worth pursuing. Publishers usually want to fix migration errors and frequently do not know about them.
6. Contributor departure
The writer whose byline carried your placement leaves, and the site removes their author archive along with the articles.
Recoverable: occasionally, if the content itself was good.
What survival rates look like
Across our own delivered placements: about 96% live at twelve months and roughly 88% at three years. Those figures come from weekly recrawls, and the twelve-month figure is a warranty rather than an average — anything that breaks inside the window is replaced.
Placements on genuine trade publications survive markedly better than placements on general-interest content sites. That gap is one of the less obvious arguments for buying on relevance rather than on authority.
Monitoring that actually works
Three fields, checked on a schedule. This is the whole system.
| Check | Frequency | Catches |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP status of the page | Weekly | 404s, redirects, site down |
| Link presence and destination | Weekly | Editorial removal, URL changes |
rel attribute | Weekly | No-follow flips |
| Index status | Monthly | De-indexation |
Any of this can be scripted in an afternoon. The reason most companies do not have it is not difficulty — it is that nobody owns the problem after the invoice is paid.
What to do when something breaks
Migration damage: contact the publisher immediately. This is the most recoverable category and publishers are usually grateful to be told. Send the old URL and the current 404.
Editorial removal: one polite email, no pressure. If the piece is still live and your reference was genuinely useful, say so. Accept a no gracefully — you will want to pitch them again.
No-follow flip: nothing to do. Assess whether the placement still earns its keep on referral traffic and brand exposure. Often it does.
Site gone: claim the replacement under your warranty, if you have one.
The warranty question
This is the commercial half of the article. Decay is predictable, so a service selling you links without addressing it has moved a known cost onto you silently.
What a warranty clause should specify:
- A monitoring window. Twelve months from publication is standard.
- Defined triggers. Removal, no-follow flip, de-indexation, 404, publisher offline.
- The remedy. A replacement placement, not a credit note.
- One carve-out, which is fair. Breakage you cause by deleting or migrating your own linked page.
The revealing question during a sales call is not "do you offer a warranty". It is "what is your twelve-month survival rate, and how do you know?" A supplier who monitors will have a number. A supplier who does not will explain that links rarely disappear.
Reducing decay before it happens
Three things measurably improve survival.
Buy on relevance, not authority. A trade publication that genuinely covers your category keeps its archive because the archive is the product. A general content site prunes.
Prefer placements inside genuinely useful content. The deletion test again: if removing the sentence would damage the article, an editor is far less likely to remove it during a revision.
Do not create your own breakage. A significant share of "lost" links are lost because the client migrated their site, changed URLs and did not redirect. Before any migration, export every URL that has been linked to and map redirects for all of them.
That last one is worth emphasising. It is the only cause on the list you fully control, and in our audits it accounts for more lost equity than editorial removal does.