Live, indexed, and passing value are three different things
A vendor marks a link complete when it is placed. Google counts it when the page is indexed and the link survives the crawl. Those are different events, often months apart, and sometimes the second never happens. The audit checks each link three ways: is the placement page live, is it in the index, and does the linking domain have any authority or traffic of its own. A link that fails any of the three is not an asset, whatever the invoice said.
Reconciling paid links against the vendor's report
If you have bought links — from a marketplace, a productized vendor, or an agency reselling one — you have a spreadsheet of promises. Matching it against the index is the audit's most valuable hour. In my own reconciliation, seven of thirty-nine placements were absent after up to ten months, and the expensive tiers failed at a higher rate than the cheap ones. Every missing link became a replacement claim under the vendor's written guarantee. Most buyers never file those claims because they never look.
Toxic links, and when to ignore them
Every domain accumulates spam: URL shorteners on a single foreign IP, gambling mirrors, scraper sites that copy your content and link back. Google says it discounts most of this automatically, and it usually does. The disavow tool is for the cases where the profile is dominated by junk you or a previous agency actually built, or where a manual action is on the table. The audit separates harmless noise from genuine risk, so you disavow surgically or not at all — a blanket disavow can cut links that were quietly helping.
Links to pages that no longer exist
Redesigns, migrations and abandoned blog subdomains leave links pointing at 404s. That authority is not lost; it is parked, waiting for a redirect. The audit maps every dead target to its closest live page and writes the rules. On sites with a few years of history, this single step often recovers more value than a year of new link building.
What you get and what it costs
A classified inventory, a reconciliation of any paid links with claims drafted, a prioritized action list, and the redirect and disavow files ready to deploy. Audits are scoped by profile size and typically run as a one-time project; the recovery work can be done by me or handed to your developer with precise instructions.
