Nightly audit flags 11.7% of 514 paid backlinks, mostly due to rewritten anchor text

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An automated system checks 514 paid backlink placements across 13 projects every night, replacing a manual process. On one night, 60 placements (11.7%) were flagged as having issues. Most failures were not deleted links but rewritten anchor text, with 93 of 95 link-related findings involving changed phrases around the link. The authors note the 11.7% figure is an upper bound, since some pages could not be read by the scraper. The system aims to verify that purchased anchors and links remain intact, detecting problems by the next morning rather than whenever someone checks.

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