Link Reclamation: How to Reclaim Lost Backlinks for SEO

Backlinks are one of the most critical assets for your online presence and SEO. However, link-building is considered by many to be a rather tricky task. Thus, it can be very irritating when the links you have earned disappear one fine day. Also, in most cases, you are deprived of the link’s worth entirely when backlinks are gone.

Getting backlinks is crucial because they can be missing for one reason; for instance, the original page may have deleted the link intentionally or by mistake. Link reclamation is the process of regaining links that may have been removed or made non-functional on various websites. Getting back the lost links is also helpful in recovering the lost organic traffic and ranking since links are among the most critical factors of SEO. In this post, we will try to explain what link reclamation is, how it can be beneficial for SEO, and how one can go about doing it.

Link reclamation: What is it?

Link reclamation is the process of finding lost or broken backlinks and then taking the necessary steps to repair and regain them. Although link reclamation is not as exciting as link building, it is essential to maintain high rankings, regain the value of the links, and leverage the link profile.

Moreover, link reclamation is another excellent opportunity for marketers to get new backlinks, provide users with a good experience, and save link juice. The webmaster of the site that linked to your site may have deleted the page that contained the link or removed the link, which leads to lost or broken links. This is the primary source of broken or lost links. However, the webmaster may also be to blame by just redirecting the linked page to another page.

Why is link reclamation necessary?

Link reclamation ensures the conservation of link equity. The SEO advantage of linking between two or more sites where the value and the authority are passed from one site to another through the links is referred to as link equity or link juice.

You may also maintain the SEO value of the links that you have built and accumulated over the years by reclaiming lost links. Since link equity is to be conveyed on the pages that have many backlinks to other pages, internal connections are also essential to fix.

Reclaiming links also benefits the user experience since it lowers the chances of the site visitors getting to the 404-error page. Most likely, you will discover other issues during the link reclamation process, for example, broken pages and duplicate content, which you can solve to increase the website’s page ranks and organic traffic.

The Requirement to Mend Broken Chains

For the following principal reasons, getting backlinks that have been lost should be a top priority:

1. Make up for lost link equity: It sends the credibility and authority of its connecting pages to your website. They are all about the loss of connections, the same as losing all of the equity accrued. It also describes how regaining links helps to make up for lost credibility.
2. Regain lost ranks: One immediate effect of missing links is decreased organic traffic and search engine rankings. The process of link-building recovery can quickly stabilize and even return lost positions.
3. Counteract the impacts of negative SEO: The goal of negative SEO is to make competitors appear lower on search engine results pages by removing or changing backlinks. Link reclamation achieves this by using a method that immediately responds to these initiatives.

When ought one to employ a method for link reclamation?

Generally, when links disappear, link reclamation becomes necessary.

There are several reasons why links can disappear:

• Broken link: When a URL is broken, users are forwarded to a 404 error page. This typically happens when websites decide to alter the structure of their URLs without properly configuring 301 redirects.
• Redirect problems: These can be brought on by an unending redirect loop or a faulty redirect chain.
• Link removal: This usually happens when your competitors are doing outreach initiatives to build links or when the author of an external article removes your link from their site in favor of a more recent resource.
• Low-quality link decay: These could be outdated links bought from private blog networks (PBN) years ago or links on spam-rated, low-quality websites.
• Disappearing content: This happens when a website connected to yours goes offline and is no longer accessible online.

Removing low-quality connections might not always be detrimental. These links might have been hurting your SEO efforts because they were probably not bringing in much traffic in the first place.

Phases of Link Restoration, Approaches, and Suggestions

Following these best practices can help your website regain lost backlinks if you’ve established that it would benefit from them:

Acknowledge the presence of Broken, Removed, or Unlinked Links.

When looking for the links, you may find those that are no longer active in the first place. To see links that vanished or became dead, use a backlink analysis tool if you have two different backlink snapshots taken at other times. All broken links need to be gathered into a list with the page it was found on after each link.

Among the frequent causes of broken or removed connections are:

– Modifying the designs of the websites or switching to a new platform – This was probably brought about by the merger or acquisition of some of the websites by other businesses.

– Domain expirations: This can be resolved by either deleting all of the website’s pages or just a portion of them.

Modifications to Policies

You might wish to retrieve lost links, nevertheless, if they were crucial to developing your page or domain authority.

4 Methods for Locating and Reclaiming Missing Links

Here are four methods for locating and recovering misplaced links:

Internal Link Breaks (4xx error)

Let’s start with the easiest to fix broken links on your website, as you, the site owner, have complete control over it.

We must first locate every broken link on your website. Using Google Search Console’s Index Coverage Report, you can identify and rectify the URLs sending users to 404 pages.

However, Google Search Console is limited in that it only displays pages that have been crawled; any pages from your website that are missing but haven’t been found or crawled will not appear.

Dragon Metrics is another tool that can help you find broken links. Its Site Auditor feature shows you all the problems with your website, including pages that have 4xx faults. The Site Auditor from Dragon Metrics can scan up to a million pages and even categorize your website’s problems into high, medium, and low-priority categories so you can decide which ones to work on first.

The next step is to fix the broken links after they have been identified. Various strategies might be required based on the reason the page sends people a 404 error.

To fix broken internal links, try these tips:

• Restore your page if it was inadvertently removed.
• If you have altered a page’s URL, ensure a 301 redirect is in place so that people attempting to access the previous URL will not be redirected to a 404-error page.
• If a page has been removed due to content consolidation, locate all internal links pointing people to it and replace them with a URL pointing to the most relevant resource or landing page.
• If at all possible, find and update all impacted internal links to the new URL to prevent redirects completely.

The 4xx error-related broken backlinks

Links pointing to your website from another domain that led visitors to a 4xx error page are known as broken backlinks. This is due to several factors. It’s possible that the author just typed the URL wrong, you modified the page URL without adequately setting up redirects, or you chose to remove the page while combining content.

Dragon Metrics can be used to identify broken backlinks. To see a list of all lost links, along with details on the target and linked URLs, the precise date the link was lost, and the reasons behind the backlink’s loss, see the Lost Links Report. Watch out for links that display a “404” for the “Target URL HTTP status.” To make filtering more accessible, you can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet.

There are various methods for repairing broken backlinks once you’ve located them:

• The ideal situation, Ask the website linking to update the broken backlink with the correct URL; however, as it is not a top priority for them, not all external site owners are willing to comply.
• You may try creating a 301 redirect from the broken backlink to the correct URL. Still, you’ll need to make sure it’s configured correctly to avoid redirect issues (or even soft 404s) in the future.
• If a page has been purposefully removed due to factors such as content consolidation, implement a 301 redirect that points to the updated resource (or, if applicable, the homepage).
• Restore the page if it was inadvertently redirected.

Errors in Redirect (301 and 302)

Inadequately configured redirects can potentially lead to problems that hurt your SEO.

Broken redirect chains are one frequent problem. If Site B is unresponsive, the connection will be lost in a broken redirect chain. Suppose we have a link that sends users from Site A to Site B to Site C. This mistake is more likely to happen if the redirect chain is longer and can be either transient or permanent. Another major problem is redirect loops. When a link takes readers from Site A to Site B, but Site B reroutes them back to Site A, creating an unending cycle of redirections, this is known as a redirect loop. Users and search engines never reach the intended target page when this occurs. In addition to degrading user experience, a redirect loop can make it more difficult for search engines to crawl your website, which will result in the loss of ranking signals and the indexation of essential pages. In addition to raising the risk of a broken redirect chain or redirect loop, too many redirects in a chain might make search engines give up on tracking the link and never get to the destination. This implies that the search engine might never even crawl or index the page.

Similar to how we identify 404 error sites, identifying internal redirect problems can be done with Dragon Metrics’ Site Auditor tool or Google Search Console’s Index Coverage Report.

Try minimizing the amount of redirects as much as you can to recover links that were lost because of problems with them. To reduce the length of the redirect chain, send users who click on the broken link straight to the destination page. In order to completely prevent a redirect, you need to replace the link on your website if it is an internal link with the destination URL.

Redirects used to lower link equity; however, starting in 2016, Google promised that all 3xx redirects would no longer result in page rank loss. To avoid using up all of the crawl budget and to lessen the likelihood of a broken redirect chain, it is, nevertheless, always preferable to restrict the number of links.

Replace a 3xx link as much as feasible with the target destination URL.

Deleted Links

When an external author removes a link from their website, sometimes links are lost.

There are several explanations for why a page may have deleted your link:

• A new external link policy may have been established by the connecting site, leading to the widespread removal of links to external websites.
• The connected website has updated its content; as a result, external links may have been unintentionally removed or replaced.
• A better resource has taken the place of your link on the connecting website. When rivals employ the skyscraper SEO tactic, this may occur.

The Linking Pages Report in Dragon Metrics can be used to identify backlinks that have been recently removed. To locate links that were lost over a specific period, you can change the date settings.

Additionally, you can add connections to “Tracked Links,” where they will be routinely crawled to check if they are ever regained and if there are any essential links that you would like to keep a careful eye on.

You will need to contact such external sites to recover the backlinks that have been removed. But initially, it’s helpful to comprehend why they removed your link.

It’s possible that they have updated their external link policy if you observe a sharp decline in external links throughout their domain. Usually, there isn’t much you can do in this situation.

If you observe that the information on their page has changed from what it was, consider whether there is a suitable space for your link to be included and whether doing so will benefit their viewers. When appropriate, you can contact them to include your link, but don’t be aggressive!

If they used a different resource in place of your link, consider whether or not the information is of higher quality. To find out why they switched and what kind of material they would like to see, you can contact the site owners. After that, make the necessary content improvements to outperform the competition before asking the website owner to restore your link.

Identifying and mending damaged internal links

The initial step in the link reclamation procedure should be locating and fixing internal links on your website.

You can use several tools to locate broken backlinks on your website, such as:

Google Search Console: You can monitor, update, and debug your website using this free service from Google.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider: To assess an online presence, Screaming Frog is a free desktop application that crawls the links, photos, CSS, script, and applications on websites.

Dragon Metrics: The beginning package of Dragon Metrics, which costs $99 a month, includes the ability to search your website for missing or broken connections.

In summary

Even though link reclamation is a very efficient SEO tactic for regaining lost rankings and traffic, website owners sometimes overlook it. It is feasible to recover broken backlinks that point to your website to increase link equity and organic traffic. To audit lost links, rank and group them, ascertain why they were taken down, and start a successful outreach, you should do the following. Positions in search engines will be strengthened by conducting link reclamation operations and routinely monitoring links.