The publisher removed my backlink
Short answer. A backlink that has been removed from a live page needs no disavow and no recrawl request: there is no anchor left for Google to read. Confirm which of four things changed first, keep dated proof of the version you paid for, then ask the publisher to restore the link or refund the placement.
Updated 2026-10-28
You bought a placement, and the anchor is no longer on the page. A link that does not exist cannot be crawled, cannot be counted and cannot be disavowed. So the useful question is narrower than it first sounds: what exactly changed on that page, and what can you prove about the version you paid for?
By Michael Lip. The Google help pages quoted on this page were read on 28 October 2026.
Four different events get reported as “the link was removed”. The anchor can be deleted from a page that stays live. The anchor can stay and the rel attribute can change. The page can start redirecting. The page can be gone. Each one leaves different evidence and each supports a different request, so identifying the case comes first.
Four things that get called a removal
Run the checks in this order. They take a few minutes and they replace guesswork with the state of the page as a crawler sees it. Replace the two example hosts with the real ones.
Case one
The anchor is gone from a live page
The page still returns 200, the post is still readable, and your domain is nowhere in the HTML. This is a real removal, and it is the one case where the publisher plainly owes you a fix.
Case two
The anchor is there and the rel attribute changed
The link survives and now carries rel="nofollow", sponsored or ugc. Nothing was removed. The link stopped passing an endorsement, which is a different complaint with a different remedy, and it is worth knowing before you accuse anyone of deleting a link.
Case three
The page now redirects
The post URL answers 301 or 302 to another address. The link may still exist at the new address, or the page may have been folded into a category page that carries no link to you.
Case four
The page is gone
The post URL answers 404 or 410. A 410 is an explicit “this was removed” and a 404 is “not found here”, but for your purposes both mean the page that carried the link no longer exists.
The three commands below separate those four cases. The first prints the status line. The second prints any anchor to your domain, so you can see an empty result. The third prints the rel attribute on the anchor if one exists.
curl -sSI https://publisher.example/post/ | head -1
curl -sS https://publisher.example/post/ | grep -o 'href="https://yourdomain.com[^"]*"'
curl -sS https://publisher.example/post/ | grep -o '<a [^>]*yourdomain.com[^>]*>'
Read a rel attribute with the dofollow nofollow checker, which explains what each value means without a network request.
Keep dated proof of what you paid for
A removal claim rests on one thing: evidence of the earlier state. Without it you are describing a memory to someone who can see only the current page.
Three kinds of record hold up. Your own output from the check above, kept with its date. A Wayback Machine snapshot of the post, if one exists, which is dated by a third party. And the order itself: the invoice, the agreed anchor and the URL you paid for.
Check the archive rather than assuming it exists. The availability API answers honestly when there is no snapshot:
curl -sS "https://archive.org/wayback/available?url=publisher.example/post/"
An empty archived_snapshots object means nobody archived that page, and you are relying on your own dated copy instead. That is why the check in the section above is worth running today rather than after a dispute starts.
What to ask the publisher for
Send one short message with three facts: the exact post URL, the date you last saw the anchor, and what the page shows now. Then make one request.
If the page is live and the anchor was deleted, ask for the link to be restored. If the whole post was taken down, ask for a refund or a replacement placement under the terms you bought. Both requests are answerable in a sentence, which is the reason they work more often than a complaint about rankings.
Keep the message free of claims about Google. A publisher cannot control indexing, and a message that blames them for it gives them an easy reason to stop reading. The removal itself is a fact they can check in a minute.
What Google says, and why a removed link is the easy case
The disavow help page states the order Google wants you to work in:
“First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible.”
And on when the tool is for:
“If you can’t remove those links yourself, or get them removed, then you should disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website.”
Both quotations are from Disavow links to your site, Search Console Help, read on 28 October 2026.
Read those two sentences together and the removed link is the easy case. Removal is the outcome Google asks for first. The disavow tool is the fallback for links you cannot get taken down. A link that is already gone satisfies the first instruction, so there is nothing left for the second one to do.
This is also why the removal question and the indexing question are separate. A link that is present on a page nobody crawls has a crawl problem. A link that is not present at all has no crawl problem to solve, because the anchor has to exist before a crawler can read it.
Three things not to do
Do not add the URL to a disavow file once the link is gone. The tool exists for links you cannot remove, and the page you would be listing no longer links to you.
Do not replace a removed link with several new ones at the same host in one week. That is the pattern a reviewer reads as manipulation, and the pace question has its own page on link velocity.
Do not treat a rel change as a deletion. A page can keep your anchor and stop passing endorsement, which is a policy the publisher chose. Check the attribute before you write the email.