Your SEO agency reports new backlinks. A backlink is a clickable link from another website to yours. The report may look reassuring, but how can you tell what actually went live?
Get the exact published pages, open them, and follow the links to your website. Compare what you find with the work you agreed to. You are checking delivery and the reader’s route, not trying to predict what one link will do to your Google rankings.
Make the report possible to check
For each claimed placement, ask the agency for:
- The full URL of the published page. A publisher’s homepage or domain name will not tell you where your link appears.
- The intended page on your website. Was the link meant to lead to your homepage, a service page, or a specific resource?
- The date it went live. Pages can change, so your own check needs a date too.
- Any agreed placement details. Keep the proposal or order handy if it specifies the kind of article, the link wording, or a correction period.
Outreach in progress belongs in a different part of the report. An editor being contacted is not the same as a published backlink.
If there are only a few reported links, check them all. With a longer list, start with the most important or costly placements, then continue through the rest.
Read one placement from a customer’s point of view
Open the actual article. Find your mention and make sure there is a clickable link, not just your business name in the text.
Read the surrounding paragraph. Would someone interested in that article understand why they might visit your site?
Then click. Check the final page on your website, including on a phone. Does it still work? Does it answer the expectation the article created?
A link can be present while sending a potential customer to last year’s offer or a page that no longer exists.
Consider an illustrative example: a yoga studio’s agency reports a link from a local activities guide to its current class schedule. The guide mentions the studio and contains a link, but the link opens an old timetable.
The placement exists, but the visitor’s next step is broken.
If the studio moved the timetable, it can restore the old page or redirect that address to the relevant current schedule. If the publisher used the wrong address, the agency can request a correction. Find out which happened before asking anyone to change the article.
A rating for the whole publisher website cannot answer any of those page-level questions. That is whyWebDiagnosis works from exact source-page URLs.
A smaller publication with a useful, relevant article may serve a reader better than a prominent domain with a link dropped into an unrelated piece.
If your agreement specifies link wording or attributes, check those as well. Nofollow and sponsored are link labels, not automatic defects. Paid placements should be labelled appropriately; removing a proper label to pursue ranking credit is not a sensible correction.
Record what you found and the next action
An audit does not need a complicated scoring system. Keep the source URL, your check date, and one clear outcome for each reported link:
| What you find | What to do next |
| The link is present, relevant, and reaches the agreed page. | Mark the placement confirmed as of your check date. |
| The link is present, but the destination is wrong or no longer works. | Check whether the publisher’s link or your own site needs fixing. Send the exact URL and expected destination. |
| The page loads, but the reported link is absent. | Ask whether this was a brand mention instead of a link, or request the correct source page and a correction. |
| The page cannot be read reliably. | Mark it unverified, retry in a browser, and ask for dated evidence. Do not call it missing yet. |
For a long list of known pages,WebDiagnosis’s Backlink Verifier can check the source URLs you supply and report the links it finds, their destinations, clickable text, and attributes.
It distinguishes Found, Not Found, and Unable to Verify. You still have to compare its observations with the agreement and investigate unclear pages. It does not discover links you were never given or judge their ranking value.
Ask for a specific fix, then judge results separately
Send the agency the source URL and your observation.
“The link is wrong” is hard to act on. A more useful message would be:
The article links to an old timetable, but the agreed destination was our current class schedule. Please confirm whether the publisher can update it and tell us when to recheck.
This gives everyone a precise next step.
Finally, keep delivery and business impact separate. A live link shows that a placement was present when you checked. It does not prove that it brought in enquiries or caused a ranking change.
Review referral visits and real customer enquiries over time, with the understanding that neither captures every person who saw the article.
A useful backlink report makes each placement traceable to a page a reader can open. Once it does, you can have a much better conversation with your agency than “Is this number good?”