link reclamation

Building a link is hard, so losing one you already earned is wasted work. Reclamation is the cleanup pass that gets it back.

What counts as a reclaimable link

A backlink tool’s lost-links report flags several reasons a link can disappear. The ones worth chasing are usually the same handful: the author removed the link, the linking page 404’d, the page got a 301 redirect elsewhere, or the page was noindexed. A related but separate play is the unlinked mention, where someone names your brand in text without linking. You never had that link, so it is not strictly “reclamation,” but the outreach motion is identical.

Recovery usually runs in one order: find lost links in a backlink tool (in Ahrefs, Site Explorer > Backlinks > Lost), confirm why each one died, then act. If your own migration broke the link, the fix is often on your side. Add a 301 from the dead URL to the live page so the reference resolves again. Google treats a permanent redirect as a canonicalization signal and shows the redirect target in results, so pointing the old URL at the new one keeps the citation working without touching the publisher.

If the link was removed on their end, you send a short, specific email asking for the fix. Because the editorial relationship or citation already exists, response rates beat cold link outreach: Ahrefs cites a campaign that recovered 31 links from 166 emails, an 18.67% conversion. It is one of the cheapest ways to add authority, which is why we run it as the first pass in link building.