The $47,312 backlink lesson: why manual link tracking is killing your SEO

Updated: December 2025

Author: Andrii Andrievskii, CEO & Founder, LinkGuard

That time we watched $47,312 disappear

Last year, one of our clients came to us with a problem.

E-commerce brand selling outdoor gear — about 800 SKUs, mostly camping and hiking equipment. They'd been building links for 18 months. Guest posts on outdoor blogs. Gear review roundups. A few local news features after they sponsored some trail cleanup thing in Colorado. Standard link building grind.

And it worked. Rankings climbed. Traffic up 340% year-over-year. Their "best camping tent under $200" page was sitting at position 3. The attribution was clear — organic traffic drove roughly $47,312 in revenue that quarter.

Then position 3 became position 5. Then 8. Then somewhere on page two where nobody scrolls.

When they finally investigated — and I mean actually dug through their link profile, not just glanced at Search Console — they'd lost 23 high-authority backlinks. Some sites had removed their guest posts entirely. Others quietly switched links to nofollow during redesigns. A few domains had expired and were now parked pages full of casino ads. One particularly annoying case: a site owner had "pruned old content" and didn't bother telling anyone.

Most of these losses happened 4-6 months before anyone noticed.

I remember the call with their marketing director. She sounded exhausted. "We did everything right," she said. "How did we miss this?"

Honestly? Because nobody was watching. And that's not unusual — it's the norm.

According to Ahrefs (their 2024 study), roughly 66.5% of backlinks eventually disappear. Two-thirds. And most SEO teams — even good ones — find out when it shows up in their traffic reports. By then it's too late to do much about it.

What backlink monitoring actually is (and isn't)

Backlink monitoring means watching your links around the clock and getting alerts when something changes.

That's it. Simple concept. Hard to do at scale without automation.

Think of it like a security camera for your link building investments. You wouldn't leave $50,000 worth of inventory in an unmonitored warehouse. (Well, maybe you would if you're feeling lucky. But you probably shouldn't.) Same logic applies to your link portfolio.

A monitoring system tracks every link you care about. When something changes — link removed, dofollow switched to nofollow, anchor text modified, page moved to a new URL, domain redirects somewhere sketchy — you find out immediately. Not three months later when rankings tank. Now.

But here's where I need to be straight with you: not everyone needs this.

If you have 30 backlinks and no active link building program, just check them manually once a month. Use a spreadsheet. It'll take you an hour. Don't pay for monitoring software — save the money for coffee or something.

The math only starts making sense when you're managing hundreds of links across multiple projects. That's when manual tracking becomes a full-time job nobody wants.

The real reason monitoring is no longer optional

I've been doing SEO since 2013. Back then, you could build links and mostly forget about them. Sure, some would vanish over time, but the pace was slow enough that quarterly spot-checks worked okay.

That world doesn't exist anymore.

Sites get redesigned constantly. Content gets "pruned" by new marketing managers trying to make their mark. Editorial policies shift. Domains change hands. CMS migrations break things in weird ways. What was a solid link on Tuesday might be a 404 by Friday — and nobody will send you an email about it.

Some numbers that still bother me:

• 15% of backlinks disappear within the first year — that's from a Moz study in 2024
• 74.3% of all links on the web are broken or redirected (Semrush crawled billions of pages for this one)
• The average enterprise site has over 2,000 backlinks to track

Do the math on manual verification. One link takes maybe 2-3 minutes if you're being thorough — loading the page, checking the link exists, verifying it's still dofollow, confirming the anchor text. That's 83 hours for 2,000 links. Per check. And you'd need to do this quarterly at minimum to catch issues early.

I don't have 83 hours lying around. Neither does your team, probably.

Who actually needs automated monitoring?

Agencies managing client portfolios. You're juggling link building for 10, 20, maybe 50 clients. Each with their own backlink profile. Each expecting you to protect their investment. One missed link removal can mean an awkward phone call with a client paying you $5,000 a month to "handle SEO."

Project-based organization helps here — separate dashboards, separate alerts, separate reporting. Your clients see what you want them to see.

In-house SEO teams at growing companies. Your link profile is a real asset. Took years to build. Directly impacts revenue. But monitoring probably isn't getting the attention it deserves because your team is drowning in content calendars, technical audits, and sixteen other priorities that feel more urgent.

And honestly? Anyone paying for link placements. Sponsored posts. Niche edits. Partnership mentions. If money changed hands for that link, you need to know when it stops working.

Had a conversation with an agency owner last month. They'd been sending $350 to a publication for a sponsored post. Monthly. For seven months. The post got deleted after month one. That's $2,450 gone. They only found out because someone clicked the link during a client presentation and got a 404. Without monitoring, they'd still be paying.

(And before you ask — yes, we've done this too. Paid for a dead link for 3 months before catching it. Annoying as hell.)

The problems worth solving

Silent link death

Your backlink is there. Then it isn't. No email. No courtesy notification. Just... gone.

I've seen this happen in a hundred different ways. Site owner decided to "streamline content." New SEO manager purging external links because they "leak PageRank" — yeah, I know. CMS migration where somebody forgot to check the redirects. Domain expired and got scooped by a gambling spam network.

The reason doesn't really matter. What matters is you didn't know for six months.

The nofollow switcheroo

This one actually makes me angry.

Your link is right there on the page. You can click it. Everything looks completely normal. Except someone quietly added rel="nofollow" and now that link is passing exactly zero SEO value.

Happened to us once. Site we'd worked hard to get a placement on did a WordPress theme update. New theme's default was nofollow for all external links. Nobody noticed for two months. Two months of a worthless link that looked perfectly fine.

We caught it eventually. Still annoyed about it though.

Paying for dead links

Already mentioned the $2,450 story. Here's another one: talked to an enterprise SEO manager who discovered their team had been paying $800/month for a "premium placement" that got deleted 5 months earlier. Invoice kept coming. They kept approving it. $4,000 total, for nothing.

When you have proper monitoring, dead placements trigger alerts immediately. Makes the refund conversation a lot easier — or at least proves you need to have one.

The spreadsheet grind

Look, I get it. You've got a Google Sheet with 500 links. Every month, somebody on your team spends half a day clicking through them, checking statuses, updating the sheet.

It works. Sort of. But that's 6+ hours that could've gone into actually building new links. Or strategy. Or literally anything else.

One agency told me their junior SEO specialist said he "almost cried from relief" when they automated this. His words. He'd been doing manual checks every Friday for eight months.

How we built LinkGuard (and when you shouldn't use it)

I built LinkGuard because I needed it. Lost too much money to untracked links. Frustrated by tools that didn't quite fit real workflows.

Here's basically how it works: you add your links — import from CSV, connect Google Search Console, or add manually if you're patient. Organize by projects (multiple clients = multiple projects, lifesaver for agencies). Set up alerts however works for you — email, Telegram, webhooks if you're building custom workflows.

Then it runs. Checks happen on your schedule. Something breaks, you hear about it. Everything's fine, you have peace of mind. Most days you don't even think about it.

But I need to be honest about alternatives.

If you're already paying for Ahrefs or Semrush, they have built-in link monitoring features. Not as specialized, but might be enough for your needs. Linkody and Monitor Backlinks are dedicated tools that have been around longer than us. SE Ranking includes monitoring in their SEO suite.

LinkGuard makes more sense if you want dedicated monitoring without paying for an entire SEO toolkit, or if you're managing links at real scale (we've got users tracking 50,000+ links — interface stays fast, alerts stay reliable).

Also: we use a token system instead of monthly link limits. Buy tokens when you need them. Don't use them, they don't expire. For agencies with fluctuating client loads, this matters more than you'd think.

What's included (and what it costs)

Monitoring that doesn't sleep. Set your own check frequency — hourly for VIP links, daily for most, weekly for the low-priority stuff you don't really care about but should probably track anyway.

Alerts your way. Email if you're old school. Telegram if you want instant mobile notifications. Webhooks for custom integrations.

Also: historical data for tracking trends over time. Project organization (lifesaver if you're juggling clients). Team permissions — because you probably don't want your intern accidentally nuking the whole dashboard.

Pricing. Tokens start at around $0.02 per link check. First 100 checks are free, no credit card. You'll know within a week if it's right for you — honestly, most people know within the first day.

That's the honest version. I'm not going to pretend our pricing is magically cheaper than everyone else's. But the token model means you're not paying for capacity you don't use, which matters if your link building volume fluctuates.

The math on not monitoring

Let me give you some rough numbers.

Say you invest $5,000/month in link building. After two years, that's $120,000 in accumulated investment sitting in your backlink profile.

If 15% of links disappear annually — roughly the industry average from Moz's data — you're losing $18,000 worth of links every year. Just... gone.

Here's the thing though: most of those losses are recoverable if you catch them quickly. You reach out to webmasters. Ask about link restoration. Negotiate replacements. Sometimes it's an accident and they fix it. Sometimes you get a refund. Sometimes you at least know to stop paying.

But you can't recover what you don't know about.

Basic monitoring costs less per month than a single lost guest post placement. The ROI math isn't complicated.

What happened after (the real story)

Remember that $47,312 case from the beginning?

After setting up monitoring, the client went back and reached out to every site that had removed their links. Just simple emails — "Hey, noticed our link disappeared. Was this intentional, or did something break during a site update?"

They sent 23 emails over about three weeks.

11 responses. 8 agreed to restore the links, though 3 of those took multiple follow-ups over 6 weeks. One site wanted $200 to republish — they passed. Two never responded despite 4 attempts. The remaining 12 were dead ends entirely: domains sold, contacts gone, one site just said "no" without explanation.

8 out of 23 came back. Eight. Just from asking.

When the client told me the final numbers, I felt a bit stupid honestly. All those months of lost traffic and declining rankings, and a third of it was fixable with polite emails. They just didn't know to send them.

That's what monitoring does. Not just catching problems — catching them while you can still do something about it.

The remaining 15 losses? Those became lessons. They diversified their link sources. Stopped putting so many eggs in one basket. Added monthly relationship check-ins with their top linking sites.

Not exactly a fairy-tale ending — they still lost money and time they can't get back. But they haven't missed another significant link loss since.

Ready to try it? Start free — first 100 link checks on us.

Questions about backlink monitoring or this article? Reach out. I read everything.

About the Author

Andrii Andrievskii runs LinkGuard. Started doing SEO in 2013 — back when guest posting was genuinely easy and Matt Cutts was still doing those Google Webmaster videos that everyone pretended to watch.

Built this tool after losing too much money to untracked link losses. Still slightly annoyed at himself for not doing it three years earlier.