shubhamxseo
Newbie
- Jun 3, 2026
- 12
- 3
Need a sanity check from people who actually track this stuff.
I bought 30 placements between January and March across a handful of different marketplaces and managed services. Mix of price points, mix of DR ranges, mix of niches. I tracked the index status at day 7, day 30, and day 60 for every single one.
Here's where I ended up at the 60 day mark.
22 of 30 still indexed and ranking on the domain. 73 percent stick rate.
That feels low to me. Or maybe it's actually normal and I just had unrealistic expectations going in. Hard to tell because nobody publishes real retention data on bought links. Platforms advertise "guaranteed indexing" and then quietly stop tracking after day 14.
Breakdown of the 8 that didn't survive:
3 never indexed at all. Day 7, day 30, day 60, still not in Google's index. Two of these were on sites that publish like 5 to 10 posts per day. Google clearly isn't crawling everything. The third was on a site that looked fine but had crawl errors when I checked it manually.
3 indexed early then dropped between day 30 and day 60. These all had a pattern I'm starting to recognize. The host site had a recent traffic decline visible in Ahrefs. Probably caught by a quality update. When the site loses rankings the placement loses value too.
2 are technically still indexed but the post got noindexed by the publisher after the fact. Found this out when I went back to verify. The page exists, the link exists, but the publisher added a noindex tag to the post after a few weeks. Probably to clean up their sponsored content footprint. The placement is effectively dead from a link equity standpoint.
What I'm trying to figure out:
Is 73 percent typical or am I picking bad sites? Some questions I'm wrestling with:
What I'm doing differently now:
Stopped buying from publishers that put out more than 2 to 3 posts per day. Too risky on the crawl budget side.
Started spot checking the actual page HTML for noindex tags at day 60. Not just relying on "site:" search.
Added a 90 day checkpoint to the tracking because if 3 dropped between day 30 and day 60 I want to see what the curve looks like further out.
Curious what retention numbers others are seeing and whether 73 percent is in the normal range or if I should be vetting harder upfront.
I bought 30 placements between January and March across a handful of different marketplaces and managed services. Mix of price points, mix of DR ranges, mix of niches. I tracked the index status at day 7, day 30, and day 60 for every single one.
Here's where I ended up at the 60 day mark.
22 of 30 still indexed and ranking on the domain. 73 percent stick rate.
That feels low to me. Or maybe it's actually normal and I just had unrealistic expectations going in. Hard to tell because nobody publishes real retention data on bought links. Platforms advertise "guaranteed indexing" and then quietly stop tracking after day 14.
Breakdown of the 8 that didn't survive:
3 never indexed at all. Day 7, day 30, day 60, still not in Google's index. Two of these were on sites that publish like 5 to 10 posts per day. Google clearly isn't crawling everything. The third was on a site that looked fine but had crawl errors when I checked it manually.
3 indexed early then dropped between day 30 and day 60. These all had a pattern I'm starting to recognize. The host site had a recent traffic decline visible in Ahrefs. Probably caught by a quality update. When the site loses rankings the placement loses value too.
2 are technically still indexed but the post got noindexed by the publisher after the fact. Found this out when I went back to verify. The page exists, the link exists, but the publisher added a noindex tag to the post after a few weeks. Probably to clean up their sponsored content footprint. The placement is effectively dead from a link equity standpoint.
What I'm trying to figure out:
Is 73 percent typical or am I picking bad sites? Some questions I'm wrestling with:
- Should I be filtering harder on the publisher's content volume? The high publishing sites had the worst retention.
- Is there a way to detect "about to be hit by a quality update" sites in advance? Two of mine got caught right as I bought.
- Are noindex tags on previously indexed posts something I should be checking for at every checkpoint? Hadn't been doing that and now I'm wondering how often it actually happens.
What I'm doing differently now:
Stopped buying from publishers that put out more than 2 to 3 posts per day. Too risky on the crawl budget side.
Started spot checking the actual page HTML for noindex tags at day 60. Not just relying on "site:" search.
Added a 90 day checkpoint to the tracking because if 3 dropped between day 30 and day 60 I want to see what the curve looks like further out.
Curious what retention numbers others are seeing and whether 73 percent is in the normal range or if I should be vetting harder upfront.
