How Rankbench keeps watch

Getting a link is the easy half. Keeping it is the half nobody usually notices going wrong.

A link placed in 2024 can disappear in a 2026 redesign, and without something watching, you find out years later or never.

The first check

Once a link is marked live, Rankbench opens the page and looks for it: the link, pointing where it was agreed, with the wording that was agreed.

A link not yet checked says so rather than claiming to be verified, and the first check runs within the hour.

Until a link is live there is nothing to check, and the panel says checks start once it is.

The rhythm

After the first check, live links are re-checked regularly and indefinitely. Not once, not for the first month.

That is the whole value. A link nobody watches is a link you are hoping about.

What each finding means

The link is on the page, pointing where it should. Nothing to do.

The link is not on the page any more. It was removed, or the page was rewritten. This is the one worth a message.

The link is there but the words changed. The link survives, the anchor was edited. Sometimes an editor tidying up, sometimes deliberate.

The link now points somewhere else. The destination was changed.

The page cannot be reached, or is hidden from Google. The page was deleted, moved, or set to noindex. A link on a page Google is told to ignore is not doing much.

You are only told about changes

You get a notification when a placed link changes or disappears, not when a check passes.

The notification names what happened and is honest about what to do with it: Rankbench keeps checking, and you may want to ask your partner about it.

That is the right tone. A link disappearing in a redesign is usually an accident, and the conversation is easier if you open it as one.

The frozen numbers

When a link goes live, the figures describing the host page and its domain are recorded and kept.

This is quietly one of the more useful things here. A link earned from a site with modest authority two years ago, on a site that has since grown, is worth more now than it was, and the record lets you see that. It also means a partner's decline of your later request can be weighed against what they were when you agreed.

What monitoring does not do

It does not fix anything. Rankbench never edits anybody's site, so a missing link is a conversation rather than an automatic repair.

It does not tell you whether the link is helping you rank. That is not knowable from a page fetch.

It does not watch links you did not agree here. Only links inside a Rankbench exchange are checked, along with guest post links, which are checked the same way. See publishing and the live check.

Where to go next

The partner ledger shows the state of every link with a partner in one place.