Monitoring
Backlink Recovery
Work verified backlink losses in business-impact order, with the score reasons, before-and-after proof, and recovery actions in one place.
Why this page is separate
The dashboard is the inventory of monitored backlinks, and a backlink detail page explains one link. Backlink Recovery is the cross-portfolio decision queue: it shows only verified unresolved losses, ranks them by business impact, and puts the evidence and next action beside each item.
A one-off failure does not enter the queue. It must be confirmed by a second observation or a contract evaluation, which keeps this workspace focused on recovery work rather than duplicating routine status monitoring.
What the evidence means
Backlink Recovery records observable public-page evidence: destination and anchor matches, the full rel token set, structural placement, canonical and robots signals, redirect chains, page title, context hashes, and conditional HTTP validator reuse.
Canonical, noindex, nofollow, and Search Console observations are signals. They do not prove a search engine indexed, ranked, credited, or removed a page. Material changes must persist across two observations before a verified event is sent.
Contracts and changed-only proof
Create immutable contract versions from the presence, earned editorial, paid or sponsored, and user-generated presets. Account contracts can be overridden by referring-domain, tag, and individual-link contracts; the most specific active scope wins.
Open a backlink to see the resolved version, clause failures, and before-and-after evidence. Diffs contain changed fields and short redacted excerpts instead of raw publisher HTML or response headers.
Recovery, incidents, and destinations
The Recovery Queue explains every score component, including verified severity, evidence confidence, business priority, guarantee and renewal dates, placement cost, incident blast radius, and recovery readiness. Cached GA4 data is labeled as a secondary signal.
Destination Guard fetches each unique target once per account, applies the configured allowed URL, prefix, or host policy, and fans the result out to affected backlinks. Incidents are correlated by deterministic rules and show the rule, likely cause, impact, and confidence.
Publisher evidence and candidate inboxes
Publisher cohorts exclude right-censored placements from rates and stay hidden until at least three eligible links exist. Retention, recovery, time-to-loss, time-to-recovery, and contract pass rates describe only your observed portfolio.
Search Console Links CSV rows and sitemap discoveries remain candidates until you explicitly choose Verify and monitor. Sampled disappearance never creates a loss event, and candidate acceptance only queues the normal backlink verification flow.
Webhooks and sitemap guardrails
Outbound webhooks use HMAC-SHA256 over the timestamp and raw request body. Copy one-time secrets immediately, reject timestamps older than five minutes, and deduplicate the X-LinkCheck-Delivery identifier. Secret rotation provides a limited overlap signature.
Sitemap discovery is opt-in per already-monitored referring domain. It honors robots.txt, stays on the opted-in host, never follows discovered page links, and enforces the displayed URL, byte, page, wall-time, redirect, and per-host pacing limits.