Guest post I paid 400 for is gone at month six. Does anyone actually get money back for this

Monitoring caught this rather than me noticing, which is the one part of the story I'm happy about.

Placement went live in December, 400 through a broker I've used maybe eight times. Article still exists at the same URL. My link is gone from it. The rest of the article is unchanged, including two other outbound links that aren't mine.

So this isn't a site cleanup or an editor purge. Somebody went into one article and removed one link.

Broker's terms say "permanent placement" with no time qualifier, which I now realise means nothing without a number. Opened a ticket four days ago, nothing back.

IME people either shrug at this or don't check at all. Has anyone here ever actually been refunded or had a link reinstated, and what did you say to get it?

permanent means until someone wants to sell the slot again

You'll get it reinstated, probably within a week, and you will not get a refund. That's been the pattern every time I've seen it from either side of the desk.

The reason it's your link and not the other two is almost always that the host was asked to remove it. Either your money site is in a vertical the host got nervous about, or somebody complained, or — most likely at month six — the host has started charging rent and your broker didn't pay it. That third one is common now and brokers hate admitting it because "permanent" was the thing they sold.

The part I'd take from this rather than the 400: check everything monthly. You caught this at six months because you monitor. Most people on this board would find out in 2027.

The rent thing is the change and it's worth dating because people still think they're buying what they bought in 2018.

Until about 2020, a guest post link stayed because nobody had bothered to build a system for taking it down. The host had one contact, one payment, and no ongoing relationship. Around 2021 the bigger placement sites started running actual inventory systems, and once you have inventory you have expiry, and once you have expiry you have renewal pricing.

So the price of a link quietly became a subscription and nobody announced it. What you paid 400 for in December was six months, you just weren't told the term.

Had exactly this in 2023 - link gone at month four, article intact, other links untouched.

What worked for me was not going to the broker at all. I found the host site's editorial contact and emailed them directly, politely, asking whether the link had been removed deliberately as I wanted to respect their policy if so. Not a demand.

Editor replied the same day, said she had no idea, and it was back within an hour. Turned out somebody at their end had been doing a "tidy" of commercial links and had gone through about thirty articles.

Broker never answered my ticket at all, before or after. Did you ever get a name for the host contact when it went live?

a diff every day would have caught it in week one

No, and that's deliberate on the broker's part — the whole business model is being the only one with the contact. Byline on the article is a name that returns nothing anywhere.

You paid four hundred pounds to a man whose entire product is an email address he won't give you.