--- title: "The Quarter We Earned 41 Links and Quietly Lost the Only One That Was Working" url: "https://backlinkbuilding.io/insight/the-quarter-we-earned-41-links-and-quietly-lost-the-only-one-that-was-working/" author: "Kartik Chugh" published: "2026-09-25" updated: "2026-09-25" --- # The Quarter We Earned 41 Links and Quietly Lost the Only One That Was Working In Q1 2026 we ran a link campaign for a B2B software client that produced 41 referring domains over 14 weeks, which was comfortably our best quarter for that account. Organic traffic to the target page went down. Not dramatically, about 12 percent, but consistently, and it kept going down while the link count kept going up. It took us most of a month to work out why, and the answer was that one link we had earned 8 months earlier had stopped pointing where we thought it pointed. Nothing in our reporting could have shown us this, because our reporting counted links and the problem was not a count. ### What we were watching The campaign was ordinary outreach. We had a resource page the client owned, we pitched it to people writing on adjacent topics, and we tracked new referring domains in Ahrefs with a weekly export. Google Search Console was where we watched the outcome. Both tools were configured correctly and both were telling the truth. Our weekly review looked at three numbers: new referring domains, total referring domains, and organic clicks to the target URL. For 6 weeks the first two rose and the third fell, and we explained that gap the way most people would. New links take time. Rankings are volatile. The page was competing in a hard space. Every one of those explanations was plausible, which is exactly what made them useless. ### What had actually happened Eight months before the campaign, the client had been cited by a widely-read industry newsletter. That single link had been doing a disproportionate amount of the work: it sat on a page that itself attracted links, and it pointed directly at the resource page we were now trying to promote. During a site migration the client's own team had done in December, that URL had been changed. The old path had been redirected, which everybody involved treated as the end of the story. The redirect was in place, the page loaded, nothing 404ed. What we did not check was that the redirect had been implemented as a 302 rather than a 301, and that it had been chained through an intermediate URL that was itself redirected. I want to be precise about the failure, because the redirect was not the mistake. The mistake was that we had no check that would ever have surfaced it. We monitored new links. We did not monitor whether existing links still resolved to the page they were supposed to resolve to. ### How we found it Not through any process of ours. A colleague was building a slide for a client review and clicked the newsletter link to screenshot the citation, and mentioned in passing that it took a moment to load. That is the entire discovery mechanism. Someone clicked a link. When we then pulled the client's top 20 referring pages by traffic and clicked every one by hand, 3 of them were landing somewhere other than intended. One was the newsletter. One had been redirected to the homepage during the same migration, which is the standard way to destroy the relevance of a deep link while keeping it technically alive. One was fine and we had misread the Ahrefs export. The newsletter link was the one that mattered. We had spent 14 weeks and a meaningful budget adding 41 new domains of mostly modest quality while the single strongest signal pointing at that page had been quietly degraded for 4 months. ### What we changed Two things, and the second is the one I would recommend to anyone. First, we fixed the redirect chain, which took an afternoon and involved no cleverness. The 302 became a 301, the intermediate hop was removed, and the target resolved directly. Second, and this is the actual lesson, we added a monthly resolve check on the top referring pages by traffic rather than by domain rating. For each one we record the final URL after redirects, the status code of every hop, and whether the anchor still appears on the source page. It runs on the top 25 links per client and takes very little time. It has since caught 2 more instances on other accounts, one of which was a source site that had rewritten its own article and dropped our citation entirely while leaving the page live. We also stopped reporting referring domains as a headline number. The weekly summary now leads with resolved links to the target page, meaning links we have confirmed still land where they should. It is a smaller and less flattering number and it is the one that corresponds to something real. When we made that change the client's dashboard number fell by about a fifth overnight, and explaining why was a better conversation than any of the ones we had been having about volatility. ### What I would tell someone running this Link building reporting is almost entirely acquisition-shaped. Every tool in the category is built to tell you what you gained, because that is what people buy. Almost nothing in the default setup tells you what you are quietly losing, and losses in this channel are silent by construction: no error appears, no page breaks, and the link still shows up in your referring domain count because the domain still links to you. In retrospect the tell was sitting in our own weekly review for 6 weeks. Links up and traffic down is not a paradox to be explained away; it is a specific signal that something in the existing profile has changed, and we treated it as noise because our instruments could only describe the additions. If you do one thing, make it the resolve check on your strongest existing links. It is unglamorous, it takes an hour a month, and it protects the asset you already paid for. The tactics that keep earning are covered in our [backlink tactics roundup](https://forkoff.xyz/blog/founder-growth/13-marketers-backlink-tactic-still-working-2026), but none of them matter if the best link you already have is pointing at a redirect chain nobody has clicked since December. --- Kartik Chugh (Simba) is a founder-operator at the intersection of distribution, culture, and narrative control in Web3. Cofounder of [FORKOFF](https://forkoff.xyz), a culture and distribution studio that designs IP-driven campaigns, event systems, and narrative loops for protocols, funds, and builder ecosystems. FORKOFF treats events as content factories, founders as distribution engines, and culture as infrastructure — not aesthetics. 3,085+ short-form clips every 13 days for clients. $5M+ in ecosystem activations across 14 countries. Previously CMO at QuillAudits, the Web3 security pioneer, where he scaled security products to 100K+ users, built 150+ ecosystem partnerships, generated $3M+ qualified pipeline, and drove 1Bn+ views across campaigns. Co-founded EdSquare (acquired). Five years across the AI, Web3, and B2B SaaS playbook. Hosted and partnered on 100+ global events across ETHDenver, Token2049, Consensus, Devcon, and KBW in 20+ countries. Leads Misfits Dubai, a founder-first community built around curated rooms rather than mass communities. Builder at Seedrail (the distribution stack for tech and VCs). Active investor in 12+ early-stage startups across crypto and AI. Frequent contributor to CoinDesk, CoinTelegraph, The Defiant, and Block Telegraph. Speaker at Token2049 Singapore and QuillCon. Advisor at TiE Global and ADSME HUB. Speaks on: founder-led distribution, events as content factories, rooms > reach, culture > campaigns, narrative control in Web3, and creator-led distribution. Available for commentary on: AI agency growth, Web3 marketing, podcast clipping ROI, founder-led GTM, KOL marketing, and ecosystem activation strategy. Based in Dubai.