About Link Plumbing
Link Plumbing is an independent site about the technical infrastructure that carries link value into and around a website — redirects, canonical tags, internal link architecture, status codes, and migrations.
Not an agency, not a tool, no affiliate links, nothing to buy.
Why plumbing
Most writing about backlinks stops at acquisition. Somebody links to you; the story ends there, as though a link were a permanent deposit.
In practice a link points at a URL, and URLs are unstable. Sites replatform. Marketing renames a section. A CMS upgrade changes trailing-slash behaviour on every page at once. A CDN rule lands in front of a server rule and quietly wins. Each of those turns a working link into a link that arrives somewhere it wasn’t aimed — a chain, a 404, a page whose canonical points elsewhere.
That’s a configuration problem with configuration answers, and it’s the part of link work that a developer can actually fix in an afternoon. It’s also the part with the highest ratio of confident folklore to documented behaviour, which is the other reason for a site about it.
What we think
Behaviour first, practice second. “You should always use a 301” is advice. “A 301 tells the crawler the resource has permanently moved, it will be followed, the target will be indexed in place of the source, and the source will eventually stop being requested” is information — and once you have it, you can work out the advice yourself for your own situation.
A canonical is a hint. This is documented, widely known, and consistently forgotten the moment something goes wrong. Canonical tags are one input among several — internal links, sitemaps, redirects, duplicate detection — and when they conflict, the search engine picks. Sometimes it picks differently from you. Designing around that is more productive than being surprised by it.
Most redirect damage is accumulated, not sudden. Nobody ships a five-hop chain. They ship one redirect, then someone ships another two years later that happens to point at the first one’s source, and a third at the second. The chain is an artefact of history, and finding it requires looking rather than reasoning.
Migrations are where link history dies. The single highest-value technical SEO task in most organisations is the redirect map for a replatform, and it’s usually built at the end, by whoever is free.
On numbers we won’t publish
You will not find an equity-decay percentage here. “A 301 passes 85% of link equity” and its variants have no published source; search engines document that 301s pass signals and do not publish a fraction. Repeating a made-up number to sound precise is worse than saying “some loss is plausible, the amount isn’t published.”
Same for crawl-budget figures, penalty thresholds, and any statistic without a real citation. Where behaviour is documented by a search engine, we say that. Where it’s observed but unconfirmed, we say that too, in the sentence rather than in a disclaimer at the bottom.
Config snippets say which server or platform they’re written for, stay minimal, and flag patterns that could loop.
Elsewhere in this network
Getting links in the first place — earning them, outreach, audits, disavow — is backlink.so. Reading the data about links — DR, tool disagreement, attribution — is backlink.is. This site handles what happens to a link once it exists.