How verification works
Every active link. Every week. Every month. Forever.
Verification is the single most important feature of Weelinx. It's why monthly-payment economics work — and why we're different from every link marketplace that came before.
The check cycles
Three layers of verification, running continuously.
Light check
Every active placement, every 7 days. Headless browser fetch — link present, rel attribute correct, page returns 200.
~2 seconds per placement. Runs in the background.
Full check
Everything in the light check, plus: indexable status, link position (body vs footer/sidebar), anchor text match, content drift comparison against verified snapshot.
30-day cycle. Triggers monthly payment release.
Spot-check
10% of active placements sampled each week for an unscheduled full check. Prevents gaming of predictable verification windows.
The anti-gaming layer. Invisible to both sides.
The checks
What the crawler actually verifies
Link presence
The target URL is present as an <a href>. No link → immediate pause.
Rel attribute
Matches what was agreed — dofollow by default, sponsored or nofollow if specified. Undeclared rel changes are a failure.
Anchor text
Matches the text that was placed. Post-publication anchor changes without dispute resolution trigger a failure.
Page status
Returns 200. Not 404, not a soft-404, not a redirect away from the expected URL.
Indexability
No <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. Not blocked by robots.txt. Not excluded from the sitemap.
Link position
Inside the article body — not in footer, sidebar, 'partners' section, or hidden CSS.
Content integrity
Content hash compared against verified snapshot. Major content changes trigger re-verification.
Headless rendering
JavaScript-rendered pages (React, Next.js, Vue SPAs) are rendered via Chromium so we see what Google sees.
What happens when a check fails
Immediate pause, 7-day grace, then cancellation.
- 0 hours — Stripe subscription paused. No further charges. Both parties notified by email.
- 1–7 days — Seller grace period to fix the issue (move the link back, restore the page, update the rel attribute, etc.).
- On re-verification pass — Placement resumes. Next month's charge goes through. Credit applied for any paused period.
- Day 8 if unresolved — Placement cancelled. Stripe subscription closed. Both parties notified. Seller loses future income from this placement.
Three failures in 6 monthson any seller triggers a manual review of all their active placements. Patterns matter — one bad month is recoverable, a habit isn't.
What if our crawler is wrong?
False negatives happen. CDNs cache, IP-based rate limits exist, CMSs briefly serve broken HTML during deploys. When they do, sellers can request manual verification:
- Seller clicks "Request manual verification" on the placement
- Admin re-checks within 24 hours
- If the automated result was wrong, payment resumes immediately and the seller is credited for any paused period
- Verification log is corrected with the manual result
False negatives are rare because we use headless rendering and retry transient failures. But when they happen, they're fixed quickly.
This is why monthly-payment works.
Without verification, monthly recurring charges on "permanent" links would be uninsurable for buyers. With it, the economics align — you pay for live links, you stop paying for dead ones.
More detail in the help centre.