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The 2023-24 paid placements, found and waiting on you

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The 2023-24 paid placements, found and waiting on you

I cannot know who paid or how much. I can tell you exactly which links look sold, and three of them I would pull today.

Prepared 2026-08-11

You asked me to backfill the old placements into the ledger. I could not do that honestly, because the ledger records who paid, how much, and over what dates, and I have no way to know any of it. Inventing those fields would have made the record worse than empty.

What I could do is find the placements from the content itself, so that confirming them is a yes or no from you rather than an archaeology project.

How they were found

I pulled every outbound link in the 1,059 articles: 2,397 links across 427 domains. Then I stripped out everything that behaves like normal writing. Reference sites went (Wikipedia, PubMed, AVMA, PetMD, the AKC). Deep editorial citations went, because a link to a specific article on a pet health site is what a writer does. Brand links from that brand's own review article went, since an Orijen review linking to Orijen is expected.

What survives that filter is the shape of a sold link: a commercial destination with nothing to do with dogs, a homepage rather than a specific page, and anchor text that has no relationship to where the link actually goes.

Twenty links, across twelve articles. Every one is dofollow and passes PageRank right now.

What turned up

The largest cluster by far. Ten links pointing at two homepages that share a name fragment, one apparently an eye-care practice and the other an aesthetics clinic. The anchor text is all dog language: "Boxer", "Retriever", "adoption process", "separation anxiety", "therapy dogs".

One of them reads, in full: "Visit our website, learn more about our [adoption process], and find your perfect furry friend." The words describe your adoption process. The link goes to somebody else's business.

Articles: boxer-lab-mix-a-complete-guide, why-shih-tzus-are-the-worst-dogs, mexican-dog-breeds. Dated April to June 2023.

Anchors "essay writer", "assignment writer", "Content Writer", on pet-policies-in-university-housing and dog-shelter-volunteering-animal-sciences. Dated January and May 2024.

Essay mills are one of the most heavily scrutinized categories of link buyer there is. If any group here is going to attract attention, it is this one.

Three different sellers, anchored "add a little CBD" and "try some Kratom", placed inside can-dogs-eat-brussels-sprouts, can-dogs-eat-ham and can-dogs-eat-grapefruit. Dated June 2023.

This is the group I would pull first, and not for SEO reasons. Those articles exist to tell someone whether a food is safe for their dog. A link suggesting CBD or kratom, dropped into that context, reads as advice about giving a substance to an animal. Kratom in particular has no established safety data in dogs. It sits directly against the project's own rule about unsupported health claims, and it is the kind of thing that would matter if a reader acted on it.

Anchor "Milyon88.vip", pointing at a Philippine casino affiliate page, from dogs-get-tattoo-when-theyre-neutered-or-spayed. Dated September 2023. The destination no longer resolves.

There is no editorial reading of this one.

A suitcase retailer linked from an article about dog carrier backpacks. A betta fish temperature guide from an article about hypoallergenic dogs. A pomsky site from an article about bonding with your dog. Individually each is arguable. Together they are the same pattern.

What I would do, in order

  1. Pull the CBD and kratom links today, whatever the commercial position. Not because of Google, but because they are informal drug suggestions sitting inside food-safety articles, on a site read by people over 50 who trust it.
  2. Pull the casino link. The destination is already dead, so it is a broken link that also happens to be a gambling placement. There is no argument for keeping it.
  3. Decide on the essay mills. These are live, they are the highest-scrutiny category, and they sit on two articles.
  4. Decide on the ten-link cluster. This is the biggest commercial relationship in the set and most likely to still be a live arrangement, so it is the one where the money question actually matters.
  5. Leave the off-topic three unless you recognize them, they may just be loose writing.

For anything you keep, the decision is whether it carries rel="sponsored". That marking is the compliant option and removes most of the buyer's value, which is exactly the tension you already know about. Right now all twenty pass PageRank, which is the version with the most upside and the most exposure.

What I need from you

For each group: was it paid, who paid, roughly how much, and is it still running. Tell me and I will move them into the real ledger with the terms recorded, add the disclosure where one is wanted, and set the rel you choose. The audit script will then keep the ledger and the live pages honest with each other.

If a group was not paid and is just old sloppy linking, say so and I will remove the links and note in the file that it was editorial, so nobody re-investigates it in a year.

Also fixed while I was in there

Three links that were simply broken, now unlinked with the wording kept: a www.example.com/user-guide placeholder that shipped to production, a literal http://link_to_user_guide, and a cloaked hash URL that no longer resolves.

Published to Annette's hub. Rebuilt from the source markdown, so edit the source and rerun rather than editing this page.