Link Verifier: check that partner links stay live

When another website agrees to link to you, Link Verifier keeps an eye on that link for you. Save the page the link is on, and we check it every week. If something changes, we email you.

You'll find it under Link Verifier in the sidebar. It's included with every active website.

What we check

• Is the link still there? We load the page and look for a link to your site.
• Anchor text. The clickable words of the link. If you tell us what they should be, we flag it when they differ. If you leave it blank, the anchor we find on the first check becomes the expected one.
• nofollow, sponsored and ugc. These rel values tell search engines not to treat the link as a normal recommendation. We show them as badges, and alert you if one is added.
• Is the page itself indexable? A link can look fine and still be worth little if the page is set to noindex, or its canonical tag points to a different page. We check the page's robots settings (including the X-Robots-Tag header) and its canonical tag.
• Redirects. If the page now redirects somewhere else, we check the page it lands on and show you where it went.
• Found in Google. Whether the page shows up in a Google site: search. More on this below.

Adding a link

1. Choose which of your websites the link is for.
2. Optionally, start from a connection. Pick a site you've connected with on LocalLinkMatch and we'll fill in their address. Change it to the exact page your link is on.
3. Enter where the link should point. A domain (yoursite.com) accepts a link to any page on your site. A full page address requires that exact page.
4. Save. We run the first check straight away.

You don't have to start from a connection. You can watch any link, including ones you arranged outside LocalLinkMatch. Each website can watch up to 50 links.

How often we check

• The page: once a week. You can also press Check now once a day per link, up to 25 on-demand checks a day across your account.
• Google: every week until the page is found, then every 4 weeks.

We don't raise an alarm over one bad result. If a link seems to be missing or the page won't load, we check again the next day. You only get an alert if it's still missing on the second check. Checks pause while a website is inactive.

If a link is still missing a week after we alert you, or the page still can't be loaded (for example a 404, or the site is down), we stop checking it automatically. Press Check now whenever you want us to look again. If the link is back, weekly checks start again on their own. A link we haven't found yet (for example, your partner hasn't added it) keeps being checked every week until it appears.

Found in Google, and checking it yourself

We search Google for site: followed by the page's address. If the page appears, it's Found in Google. If not, it's Not found in Google.

A site: search is a good guide, but it isn't the final word. A page can be indexed and still not appear in a site: search. Treat "Not found" as a reason to take a look, not as proof. Once a page has been found, we only mark it "Not found" after it's missing from two checks in a row.

Every link has a Check in Google yourself link that runs the same search in your own browser. If you can see the page, press I see it, mark as found. We'll record that and move the page to the 4-weekly schedule.

If the page isn't in Google, the site owner can ask Google to crawl it: in Google Search Console, paste the page address into the URL Inspection bar at the top and choose Request indexing. It's usually picked up within days, and we'll keep checking weekly until it is.

Alerts

If anything changes, we send one summary email a day, not one email per link. We tell you when:

• a link is removed, or comes back
• the anchor text changes
• nofollow, sponsored or ugc is added or removed
• the page becomes noindex, or its canonical tag points elsewhere
• the page can't be loaded
• the page is found in Google, or drops out of it

Alerts go to the contact email of the website the link points to, the same address that receives connection requests for that website. If a contact looks after several websites, their changes arrive together in one email. If a website has no confirmed contact email, alerts go to whoever added the link instead (or the account owner, if that person has left the account).

You choose how much you hear about:

• One link: press 🔔 Alerts on · mute on its card.
• One client: if your account has several clients, untick the client under Alerts by client at the top of the Link Verifier page. This mutes every link on that client's websites, for everyone on your account.
• From the email itself: the link at the bottom of any alert turns them off for that client, no login needed.
• Anything sent to your own address: turn off Link Verifier alerts in Settings.

Muting only stops the email. Muted links are still checked, and any changes still show on the Link Verifier page.