Set Up Monitoring

Monitoring is what turns TraceLinker from a one-shot audit tool into a continuous backlink defense system. You pick the links you want to keep, we re-check them on schedule, and you get an email the moment something changes.

What gets monitored

The links you most want to know about:

• High-score audit results (scores 70+).
• Money-page links (links pointing at your top-converting pages).
• Paid placements (every link you paid for, regardless of score).
• Links you spent outreach effort to acquire.

Don't monitor every link. Free plan covers 5 links, Pro 100, Agency 1,000 - keep the slots for placements you'd actually act on if they died.

Adding a link to monitoring

There are three ways:

From an audit

Easiest. After an audit completes, select rows (or use the "Score 70+" preset filter) and click Move to monitoring. The selected links are inserted into the monitored_links table with status alive and the next check scheduled per your plan frequency.

📸 Audit detail with rows selected and Move to monitoring button highlighted

From the monitoring page

Click Monitoring in the sidebar, then + Add link. A modal asks for source URL, target URL, optional label. Useful for one-off additions outside an audit (e.g. a paid placement you want to track immediately).

📸 Add link modal on the monitoring page

Via CSV

In the Add link modal, switch to the CSV tab and paste a list of source/target pairs. Bulk add for migrations from another monitoring tool.

Picking a check frequency

Frequency depends on plan and on the link's importance.

Free plan defaults to weekly and can't change it. Pro and Agency users can set frequency per-link or set a default in Settings → Monitoring defaults.

The monitoring table

Click Monitoring in the sidebar to see all currently monitored links.

Columns:

The status column has color coding: green for alive, amber for changed, red for dead. Sorting by status puts dead at the top so you spot regressions instantly.

Inspecting a single link

Click any row to open the link detail page. You see:

📸 Link detail page with timeline of all checks

• Top card - source URL, target URL, current status, AI score and reasoning.
• Timeline - every check ever run on this link, with status and any transition flagged.
• Notifications panel - per-link mute toggles for transition types you don't care about (e.g. some users mute alive → changed if anchor edits aren't actionable).
• Manual actions - "Run check now" forces an immediate re-check. "Pause" temporarily stops scheduled checks. "Remove" deletes from monitoring (audit history is kept).

Transitions

A transition is when status changes between two consecutive checks. This is what triggers emails and dashboard alerts.

Common transitions

alive → changed The link still works but something changed. Most common causes:

• Anchor text edited (often a brand-name update).
• Surrounding paragraph rewritten.
• dofollow flipped to nofollow or ugc/sponsored.
• Link moved to a different position on the page.

The email shows a diff so you can decide if the change is good (brand mention added) or bad (your keyword anchor stripped).

alive → dead The link is gone - removed from the page or page itself 404s. This automatically triggers a reclaim draft. The email arrives with a link to review and send the auto-drafted outreach.

dead → alive The link came back. Rare but useful for paid placements where you've been chasing recovery, or for links removed during a site redesign and restored after.

Email format

Every transition email contains:

• The transition type, source URL, and target URL.
• A short diff (anchor text before/after, dofollow change, etc.).
• A direct link to the link detail page.
• For alive → dead, a link to the auto-drafted reclaim email.

You can switch transition emails to a daily digest in Settings → Notifications if you don't want one email per event.

Tuning alerts

Default settings email you on every transition. Most users tune this within the first week:

• Mute alive → changed if anchor edits aren't actionable for you. They are noisy on big sites.
• Mute dead → alive if you don't track paid placements.
• Switch to daily digest if you monitor 100+ links and don't want individual emails.
• Per-link muting for one specific noisy domain that keeps changing anchors.

All available in the Notifications settings page.

Bulk operations

Top of the monitoring page has bulk actions:

📸 Monitoring page bulk action toolbar

• Pause selected - stops scheduled checks without removing from monitoring.
• Resume selected - restarts checks.
• Remove selected - deletes from monitoring (audit history kept).
• Re-check selected - forces immediate checks on selected rows. Useful before sending a status update to a client.

Scaling beyond 1,000 links

Agency cap is 1,000. If you legitimately need more (large agency with many clients), email support. We rarely raise it for individual users; instead, archive old links you no longer need by removing them from monitoring (audit history is kept regardless).

What happens behind the scenes

For the curious - each scheduled check:

1. Cron worker picks up the row when next_check_at <= now.
2. The crawler fetches the source URL with Mozilla/5.0 UA, no JS execution.
3. We parse the DOM for anchors pointing at the target domain.
4. Compare with previous check's anchor: same → alive, different → changed, none found → dead.
5. Insert a row into monitor_logs, update monitored_links.status, schedule the next check.
6. If status changed, fire transition pipeline (email + reclaim draft + dashboard event).

Cost: about $0.0001 per check (the crawler is free, no AI call unless transition rescore is enabled).

Troubleshooting

A link shows dead but I see it in my browser Some sites are heavy SPAs that don't SSR their links, or block our user agent. Use the row's Mark false positive action - we re-verify with a different fetch strategy. If it still fails, switch the row to manual verification.

Notifications stopped arriving Check Settings → Notifications for "All transition emails muted". Also check your email provider's spam folder; whitelist [email protected] if it routed there once.

Daily check ran twice in 24 hours Daily means "approximately every 24 hours from last_check_at". If you forced a manual recheck, the next scheduled one shifts forward.

Next

• Reclaim Lost Links - what to do when a transition fires alive → dead.
• Email Notifications - tuning every email setting.
• Plans & Pricing - when 5/100/1,000 monitored is the right level.