Free tool
Backlink decay calculator
Link loss is the thing everybody feels and nobody counts. Put your own numbers in and it becomes a figure you can take to a budget meeting.
At month 12, losing 3% a month
- Still standing
- 35
- of 50 placed
- Gone
- 15
- $3,750.00 of placement spend
- Half-life
- 22.8 mo
- until half the links are gone
What it costs in money
- Placed at month 0
- 50 links × $250.00
- $12,500.00
- Rebuild to 50 at month 12
- 15 replacements, having done nothing in between
- $3,750.00
- Hold the count flat the whole way
- 18 replacements over 12 months
- $4,500.00
- Effective cost per link still live
- $12,500.00 spent ÷ 35 surviving
- $357.14
Exact figures, not estimates of figures. Link counts are whole numbers and every amount is a whole number of cents multiplied by one of them. The effective cost per surviving link is the only division, rounded to the nearest cent.
The curve
| Month | Surviving | Lost | Spend no longer standing |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 50 | 0 | $0.00 |
| 3 | 46 | 4 | $1,000.00 |
| 6 | 42 | 8 | $2,000.00 |
| 12 | 35 | 15 | $3,750.00 |
Where these numbers come from
Two different failures
A link you paid for can fail in two completely different ways, and conflating them is how campaigns get budgeted badly.
It never went live. The post was never published, the link went in nofollowed, the anchor was not what you bought, or the page was noindexed. This is not decay — it is a placement that never existed, and paying for it is avoidable. On LinkersPro the publisher is not paid until a machine has checked the link is live, indexed, correctly anchored and carrying the attribute that was sold.
It went live and then went away. That is what this calculator models. Posts get pruned, sites get redesigned, links get edited out quietly. Every LinkersPro placement is re-checked through the guarantee window, and a link that fails after the publisher has been paid is remedied with account credit rather than an apology.
How the arithmetic works
- Survivors compound: each month keeps (1 − rate) of what was standing the month before, rounded to whole links.
- Every amount is a whole number of cents times a whole number of links. No amount is derived from a decimal.
- “Hold the count flat” assumes a constant population shedding count × rate a month, totalled across the horizon and rounded once at the end.
- Half-life is ln(0.5) / ln(1 − rate), to one decimal place.
No part of this touches our servers. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored.
Where to get your own loss rate
Take a cohort of links you placed at least six months ago, check how many still resolve with the anchor and attribute you bought, and divide. That number is worth more than any figure a vendor publishes, including ours — which is why the field above starts empty of any claim from us.