Verification and monitoring

The link type (dofollow or nofollow) is what we read on that page. A directory's own claim is shown as a claim, and never counted as verified.

verify_link opens the listing page from our server and applies the same rules everywhere (the dashboard's checks, the weekly pass and your agent's call):

• Found means the page has a link (<a href>) to your site. Addresses are compared without www., case and a trailing slash, and a link to a page under your site (yoursite.com/pricing) counts.
• A mention is not a backlink. Your domain appearing in the text but not in a link is reported as not found, with a note.
• Nofollow is a rel containing nofollow, ugc or sponsored. Anything else is dofollow. The result also returns the rel tokens and the anchor text.
• An error status (a 404, say) means the page answered and the link is not there: a dropped listing. Only a network failure is "unreachable", and it is reported, never alerted on by itself, because a flaky host is not evidence the link is gone.

Pages are fetched only from public web addresses (http and https, ports 80 and 443); private and internal addresses are refused, and a page is read up to 5 MB. A page that needs a browser to draw its links, or hides them behind a login, is read as it is served, so a listing that only shows after sign-in cannot be verified this way. Your agent can then look at it in your browser and tell you.

Directories seldom show the listing address at submit time, and approval takes days to months. So the record says what to do next:

• After submitted, your agent waits, and the dashboard's Check if live card (and list_submissions) flags a directory once its usual approval time has passed: 14 days when the playbook does not state one, and 7 days after a check that did not find your link.
• Your agent then finds your listing on the directory (its dashboard of your submissions, or its search) in a browser you can watch, and calls verify_link with the page and the directory.
• If the listing is not published yet, it tells you and records nothing.

Long queues are planned early for this reason: a directory that takes about four months goes first, so its wait runs alongside everything else.

Some free listings ask for the directory's badge or a link back on your site. After you deploy the change, verify_badge opens your page (the website by default, or the page you name) and checks that it links to the directory, and whether that link is dofollow. Run it before you press the directory's own verify button, so you do not fail a check that only needed a deploy.

A placed link is not permanent: directories prune listings, move pages and quietly add rel="nofollow". On Pro (€39 a month or €349 a year) every listing with a public page is checked again each week, and the result is saved as history. Check now on Live backlinks runs the same check on demand (it skips links checked in the last hour). On Free and Launch, your agent can still verify a link whenever you ask, and those checks reach the dashboard; the weekly pass is what stops when Pro does, and the history stays visible.

Alerts come from the last two checks of each listing, so one bad reading never raises one:

Listings with a problem sort to the top of Live backlinks and are counted as Needs attention. A check that finds the link moves a submitted listing to live.

The Overview's DR chart plots real readings only, one point a day (Ahrefs Domain Rating, or a figure you or your agent gave), never an estimate. It is read weekly for every product, and you can read it now once every 20 hours. A gain is the latest reading minus the first, so it shows what happened, and not what was promised: DR counts every link to a domain, so it is a record of your launch and not a controlled test of directories alone.

Link checks (verify_link and verify_badge) are limited to 60 an hour per account, on every plan, because each one opens a page from our server. A real launch checks a few links a day. See the tool limits and plans.