How to check the backlinks your agency invoiced you for

An invoice check is not a backlink audit

Analysing your backlink profile asks a broad question: what shape is this, and is any of it dangerous? That's a different job, and how to analyse a backlink profile covers it.

This page asks a narrow one: did I receive the specific thing I paid for last month? It's reconciliation, the way you'd reconcile any other invoice, and it needs the agency to hand over four fields per link before you can start.

• The exact URL of the page carrying the link — not the domain. "Placement secured on a DA 45 site" is not a deliverable, it's a claim.
• The date it went live. Links reported in March that first appeared in November were somebody else's work, or nobody's.
• Whether it was paid, and how. You're entitled to know if the line item you funded was outreach or a rate card.
• The anchor text used. If the agency chose exact-match commercial anchors across twenty domains, that's a footprint, and it's yours now, not theirs.
• Anyone doing real outreach has this in a sheet already, because they needed it to run the campaign. The delay in producing it is itself the answer.

The six checks, in order

Each check kills one specific way a link report gets padded, and they're ordered so the cheapest kill comes first. Ten links takes about ten minutes. Sample rather than doing all forty — if four out of ten fail, you don't need the other thirty.

• Do them in this order. Half of what fails, fails at check two, and there's no point examining the rel attribute on a page Google has never indexed.
• Pick the ten links at random, not the ten the agency put at the top of the list. The order in a report is never accidental.

Live is not indexed, and indexed is the one that matters

This is the check most founders skip, and it's the one that most often changes the picture. A page can load perfectly in your browser and be entirely absent from Google's index — in which case the link on it does nothing for you whatsoever.

The test takes ten seconds. Paste the full URL into Google after site: — the operator Google documents for restricting results to a site or page. One result means it's indexed. Nothing means it isn't, and you should ask why.

• A noindex tag on the article. Some link sellers publish the piece, take the money, and keep the page out of the index deliberately so the footprint never accumulates. You paid for a page nobody counts.
• A section blocked in robots.txt. Whole /guest-posts/ directories get blocked, sometimes by accident, sometimes not.
• A domain Google has mostly dropped. Try site: on the bare domain. If a site claiming 40,000 pages returns a handful, the domain is in trouble and your link is on a sinking one.
• A brand-new page. Give it two to three weeks before concluding anything. Then check again — and hold the agency to re-checking, because that's the job you're paying for.

Followed, sponsored, and the honest link that's worth nothing

Open the page source and find your link. What sits in its rel attribute decides whether it does anything for rankings at all.

Google's guidance is that paid placements should carry `rel="sponsored"`, with `nofollow` still acceptable. So a publisher who marks your paid link correctly is behaving well — and passing you nothing. That's the trade nobody explains when the line item is labelled "off-page": either the link is marked and inert, or it's unmarked and both parties are outside Google's guidelines.

Neither outcome is what the invoice implied. Which is the point of checking.

• Check the link, then check the page. A page-level <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> quietly neutralises every link on it, including yours.
• Check whether the link exists in the raw HTML. If it only appears after scripts run — inside a widget or a related-posts carousel — treat it as far less reliable than an anchor in the article body.
• A nofollowed link isn't worthless in general. Coverage on a site real buyers read sends real people. It's worthless as the thing you were invoiced for, if the invoice was about rankings.
• Anchor text is the other half. Exact-match commercial anchors repeated across unrelated domains is the clearest footprint of a purchase — and see paid links versus earned links for what that pattern costs later.

The two ways a link count gets inflated

Assume the links are live, indexed and followed. The count on the invoice can still be several times the number of endorsements you actually received, in two specific ways.

Both are easy to spot once you know the shape, and both are common enough that we check them before anything else on an inherited profile.

• Sitewide placements counted per page. A link in a footer, sidebar, blogroll or theme template appears on every URL of that site. One deal, one endorsement — reported as 4,000 backlinks. Google names widely distributed footer and template links as link spam in its own policies, so this one is worse than merely misleading: you're paying for something that carries risk.
• Several links from one article. Three mentions inside one guest post is one referring domain. It arrives in reports as three.
• The same article, syndicated. Copy a distinctive sentence from the placed piece and search it inside quotes. If it appears on six sites, you bought one piece of content distributed across a network, not six placements.
• The same slot sold repeatedly. Open the linking site's own outbound links. If a "resources" or "partners" page carries thirty unrelated commercial links, you've rented a spot in a queue, and every neighbour in that queue is a footprint you now share.
• The tell that settles it: does the site publish anything an actual reader would come back for? Open five recent posts. Twelve unrelated industries in one blog category is an order form with a theme on top.

Reconcile the count against the price

The final check is arithmetic, and it's the one that predicts the other five. Take the link portion of the retainer and divide it by the number of links delivered.

On a ₹75,000 monthly retainer, link work is realistically ₹15,000–₹22,000 of it once technical and content work is funded. Call it ₹20,000. Now read the row your invoice lands on.

• A mid-size Indian retainer produces a handful of new referring domains in a good month and none in a month when a campaign didn't land. How agencies actually get backlinks works the number out from the hours.
• Volume that doesn't move with effort is the tell. Exactly ten links every month, month after month, is a subscription to a supplier, not a campaign.
• For what individual links genuinely cost at each tier, see link building cost in India.
• If the arithmetic looks wrong, run the same diligence you'd run before hiring — checking an agency's references usually surfaces whether this is a pattern or a bad quarter.