The Link Building Planner

Most link building is planned in a spreadsheet, and for good reason: a plan has to hold whatever the campaign actually looks like, and no form anybody designs survives contact with that. The problem is never the spreadsheet. It is that the spreadsheet knows nothing about the domains in it, so every figure in it was pasted by hand from somewhere else and is as old as the day it was pasted.

The planner is the same grid with that one gap closed. Seventeen fields a row, every one editable in place: the domain, where you are buying it, the four metrics, link type, target URL, anchor text and anchor type, status, planned and live dates, the live URL, price and currency, whether it has been paid, and a notes field for the things that do not fit anywhere.

Filtering, sorting and paging all happen in the database, fifty rows to a page, so a plan with two thousand rows in it behaves like a plan with twenty.

There is no link checking. No lost-link detection, no crawl of a publisher's site, no scheduled job watching your placements. "Live" means somebody pressed Live — it is a status on your own board, not a verification, and every screen that shows a live count says as much.

This is a decision rather than an omission. A free tool that implied it had confirmed a backlink would be making a claim we cannot stand behind, and the version of this feature that checked links would either cost money per row or be wrong quietly. Neither is worth having.

For the same reason there is no Ahrefs call, no Majestic, no Moz, no SEMrush, no model and no crawl anywhere in it. The only lookup of any kind asks our own publisher table about a domain you typed, and that is why the planner can be free without a limit on how long you use it.

Seven questions, all of them from your own rows and none of them estimated:

• How many links you planned in a month, and how many of those are marked live
• What you have paid, and what you are committed to, month by month
• Which sources you are spending with
• How the plan splits by link type and by anchor type
• Where everything currently sits by status

A report that needed a figure we do not hold is left out rather than filled in. Where a plan mixes currencies, the foreign rows are counted separately and never converted — an exchange rate we picked would turn your budget into our guess at your budget.

A placement bought through Press Parrot can be pulled into the plan in a click. Five fields are copied across and the row keeps a reference back to the order.

A reference, deliberately, not a copy that owns anything. Moving a planner row to Cancelled is you tidying your own board; it must not cancel a placement we are in the middle of delivering, and changing a planner price must not change what you were charged. Importing the same order twice gets you one row, enforced by the database rather than by anyone remembering.

The planner tables carry one policy, scoped to your own account, on both reading and writing — and, unlike every other internal table here, no admin policy at all. There is no screen anywhere in the Press Parrot admin that lists your planner rows.

That is not decoration. A plan holds which suppliers an agency uses and what it pays them, which is exactly the information a marketplace should not have standing access to.