Money goes out. Proof does not always come back.
Paid placements are the easiest links to lose and the hardest to justify.
A vendor confirms a placement by email and you pay the invoice. Three months later the article has been edited and the link is gone, or it was nofollow from the start. When the client asks what the budget bought, the cost is in one file and the links are in another.
The cost of an unverified placement is not just the fee. It is the client conversation when they find the link missing before you do, and the budget review where nobody can show which vendors delivered. A paid link is only an asset while it is on the page, so the record of the deal and the record of the link need to live together and be checked on a schedule, not when someone remembers.
The deal and the link, together.
Vendor, cost, payment status and reference per placement.
Each paid placement is logged with its vendor, cost, payment status and reference, next to the link itself. Because the link is checked, you can see it is Active and Dofollow before the payment goes out.
See what each deal returned.
Spend, link value and exchange savings side by side.
The ROI Calculator compares what you spent with the value you assign to the links and the cost you avoided through exchanges, per client and link type. It uses only the figures you log.
A checklist for paid placements.
Check it. Then pay for it.
Proof and payment in the same record.
The tools behind paid link tracking.
Every feature listed here is live in the app today.
SEOENV does not sell links and does not broker placements. It records the ones you already agreed. Google’s spam policies treat paid links meant to pass ranking signals as link spam, so qualify paid placements with rel=”sponsored” or nofollow where they apply.
The SEOENV team · Last updated 14 October 2026
Who uses this.
Where this fits in SEOENV.
Paid link tracking and the sponsored attribute
Paid link tracking also means recording how each link is marked. For example, Google asks that paid links use rel=sponsored or nofollow, and it lists buying links that pass ranking credit under link spam. Therefore, log the rel value with each deal.
Meanwhile, the ROI side links to link building reports. Also see backlink monitoring, guest post tracking and the backlink manager overview.
