If you’re an SEO professional, a marketer, or a website owner, you know how important backlinks are to your website.
Time and time again, they’ve been proven to be the most powerful tool to push the needle in website performance.
However, a recent study from Ahrefs found that 66.5% of all links in the last nine years are now dead.
What does this mean? Well, it means link rot is a real thing. If you had a backlink nine years ago, the likelihood you still have it is 34.5% - or, in other words, very, very small.
That’s where link reclamation comes in. You audit these lost backlinks and reclaim them so you can regain your website authority.
What is Link Reclamation?
Link reclamation is when you reclaim lost backlinks. Simply put, you lost a link, and you’re getting it back.
Why do Links Need Reclaiming?
There are several reasons why links need reclaiming. The main ones are the following:
- The website owner removes your link.
- The linking page doesn’t exist anymore (404 error).
- The linking page is a 301 redirect (or some type of redirect).
- The linking page isn’t indexed by search engines anymore.
When it comes to reclaiming links, the reason they need reclaiming usually determines whether you should reclaim them. We’ll go more into this below.
Is Link Reclamation Worth it?
100%. It’s worth auditing to see whether it’s worth pursuing. However, never pursue without doing an audit first (we’ll show you how to do this in this post).
A study from Antonio Gabric showcased this perfectly. They analysed their backlink profile and discovered they lost 9% of the backlinks they acquired over the last 3 years (this was 74 in total).
Each backlink cost around $320 (USD), meaning they lost close to $24,000 - which, even for Moz, is a lot of money.
Upon analysing, they found that the most common reasons for links being deleted were because of the owner or due to technical issues. So they did something any SEO professional would do: reach out to the website to reclaim them.
The results: 31 backlinks were reclaimed in 30 days. Or, in monetary terms, close to $10,000 in backlinks.
How to Perform Link Reclamation
If you want to start reclaiming lost links, you’ll be happy to hear that it’s pretty simple. It can be completed in just 3 steps.
Identify Lost Links With an SEO Tool
If you’re going to perform link reclamation, we recommend using a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
In this how-to guide, we’re going to use Ahrefs; however, the process is very similar to that of all SEO tools.
On Ahrefs, go to the “Site Explorer” tab. Once here, enter your domain in the search bar, click “Backlinks”, and then click “Lost”.
You’ll now have a list of lost links (aka links you can potentially reclaim). As standard, it’s set to “Last 30 Days”, so if you’d like to look further back, change this setting.
At this time, you could have hundreds and maybe even thousands of potential links. Not all of these are worth pursuing.
Ahrefs has made this easy for us to narrow down. On the “Best Links” tab, select “Show best links only”. You can then narrow it down further by going to “+ More filters” and “Language” and then choosing your native language, in our case, English.
After completing the above, you should have a list of link reclamation opportunities.
Choose the Top Opportunities
If you have thousands of links that need reclaiming, don’t worry. You don’t need to do all of them. Most aren’t worth it. However, some are very worth it.
On Ahrefs, you’ll see the reason for the lost link, which is highlighted in red under the URL.
You can also filter by “Status” (aka problem).
When looking at each of the reclaiming opportunities, this is how we look at them:
- Link removed — Usually worth following up
- Not found — Occasionally worth following up
- Broken redirect — Sometimes worth following up
- Noindex — Likely not worth pursuing
- Not canonical anymore — Likely not worth pursuing
- 301/302 redirect — Often not worth pursuing
- Crawl error — Not worth following up
- Dropped — Not worth following up
As you can see, some are worth pursuing while others aren’t. It’s all about finding the ones that matter most and prioritising them.
Link Removed — Usually Worth Following Up
As you can imagine, “Link Removed” means that the link has been removed from the web page.
This can happen for various reasons. Perhaps the website owner refreshed their content, replaced your link with a better one, or just removed it.
If you click on “Show changes” (located near the reason for the lost link highlighted in red), you get a better picture of what’s happened.
Once clicked, you’ll have two reports—one in red and one in green. The red one is for removed content, and the green one is for new content.
Upon review, you can then determine how you’ll contact the website owner.
Perhaps they updated the link with a better one. In that case, you can mention that you’ve updated your content, and your content is now better than the new content they linked to.
Not Found — Occasionally Worth Following Up
This means that, based on the last crawl from AhrefsBot, they couldn’t find the linking page.
There are several reasons this can occur. The main two are that the site owner deleted the page intentionally or accidentally. The third reason is that the Ahrefsbot couldn’t access it for whatever reason.
You’ll want to contact the site owner if, for example, you click on the link and it doesn’t go to a 404 page, or the page has a load of referring domains pointing to the page.
Broken Redirect — Sometimes Worth Following Up
A broken redirect just means that the page with the link has been redirected but the redirect doesn’t work.
The only time you’ll want to reclaim these links is if they’re returning a 404 error with backlinks. Otherwise, it isn’t worth it.
Noindex — Likely Not Worth Pursuing
This means that the website owner has added a “noindex” tag to a web page, so AhrefBot and other bots like GoogleBot won’t index it.
For the most part, this isn’t worth pursuing. The only time it's worth it is if it looks like a mistake. You can usually see this if there are signs of SEO, such as referring domains, but it’s been noidexed.
Changed Canonical — Likely Not Worth Pursuing
A changed canonical means that the linking page is now specifying another resource as the canonical page.
Mostly, this isn’t really a “lost” link. You’ll still get link juice through the new canonical page.
However, it’s always worth clicking on the URL. If you get a “non-secure” error, then it means the canonical isn’t set up properly. In this case, it may be worth contacting the site owner.
301/302 Redirect — Often Not Worth Pursuing
This means the linking page is redirected to a different URL. If you set it up properly, though, you still get link equity from the page.
Crawl Error — Not Worth Following Up
Crawl errors come from the AhrefsBot. These aren’t worth claiming. Most of the time, it’s a mistake from the AhrefsBot, and it’ll reappear in the next crawl.
Dropped — Not Worth Following Up
This means that Ahrefs dropped the referring page from the database. Usually, this happens when Ahrefs crawls a better page, the page has a low DR, or it’s been disallowed.
Reach Out
The goal of step 2 was to eliminate unnecessary link reclamation opportunities. You should now only have a list of opportunities that are worth pursuing.
You can now contact the website owners to see whether you can reclaim the lost link. All you need to do is send a friendly email. Explain the lost link and give a reason why they should re-add it.
You may have updated your old content or spotted a problem with their website. Whatever the reason, mention it to them and see how they respond.
If it’s a complete mistake, for the most part, they’ll just re-add the link. If it’s for another reason, they’ll tell you. From here, you can act on their response and see whether they’ll link you afterwards.
Conclusion
After reading the above, you should know more about link reclamation. You should know what it is, why it’s important, whether it’s worth it, and, most importantly, how to do it.
The overall process of link reclamation is pretty simple. However, it can bring some good rewards.
Depending on the size of your website, we recommend you do this monthly or quarterly. This seems to be a good amount of time in between lost link audits.
