Link Reclamation: How to Find and Recover Lost Backlinks

Every site loses backlinks over time. Pages get deleted, articles get rewritten, and site migrations break old page addresses without anyone noticing.

Link reclamation is the process of finding those lost links and getting them back. Because the linking site already chose to reference you once, recovering a lost link is usually far easier than earning a brand new one.

What Is Link Reclamation?

Link reclamation means finding the backlinks your site has lost, working out why each one disappeared, and restoring the ones worth keeping.

Some fixes happen entirely on your own site, such as redirecting a deleted page. Others need a short, polite email asking the site owner to restore or update the link.

The problem is bigger than most site owners expect. An Ahrefs study of more than 2 million websites found that at least 66.5 percent of the links pointing to them since 2013 had been lost.²

Why Backlinks Get Lost

Before you contact anyone, find out why the link disappeared. The reason tells you whether the fix is on your side, on theirs, or not worth pursuing at all.

• Your page was deleted or moved. The link still exists, but it now points to a page that returns a 404 error.
• Your redirect broke. A migration or a change to your page addresses left old links leading nowhere.
• The link was removed. The page still exists, but an editor updated the article and took the link out.
• The linking page was deleted. The article, or the whole site, no longer exists.
• The linking page was hidden from search engines. The link is still there, but the page has been set to noindex, so search engines no longer count it.

Which Lost Links Are Worth Reclaiming?

Not every lost link deserves an email. Use this guide to decide where to spend your time.

Start with the fixes on your own site. They need nobody’s permission and usually recover the most value in the least time.

How to Find Lost Backlinks

You need a backlink tool that tracks links over time. Google Search Console shows your top linking sites, but it does not report which links you have lost.

1. Check lost links in a backlink tool

In Ahrefs Site Explorer, open the Backlinks report and switch the view to Lost. Semrush offers a similar view in its Backlink Analytics report.

Filter to the last 30 or 90 days so you are working with recent losses the site owner will still remember. Then sort by the authority and traffic of the referring domain, and work from the top.

2. Find your pages that return a 404 error but still have links

In Ahrefs, the Best by Links report filtered to 404 pages shows every missing page on your site that other sites still link to. These are your quickest wins.

After a redesign or migration, you can also run your site through our free Broken Link Checker to catch broken pages and links before they cost you more authority.

3. Check the page history

For links marked as removed, open the linking page and search for your brand name. If the link has gone, look the page up on the Wayback Machine to see how it looked when it linked to you.

This shows whether the link was removed on purpose, lost in a rewrite, or swapped for a competitor. It also gives you the exact sentence to quote in your email.

How to Reclaim Lost Links

Fix everything on your own site first

If a page with backlinks returns a 404 error, add a 301 redirect to the most relevant live page. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new page should replace the old one, so the link keeps working for readers and search engines.³

Redirect to a closely related page, not your homepage. A redirect to an unrelated page is less useful to readers and is often treated in the same way as a missing page.

Also make sure each redirect goes straight to the final page. Long chains of redirects slow down crawling and are easy to break during the next migration.

Then contact the site owner

For links removed from live pages, send a short, friendly email. Editors rarely remove links on purpose, and most of the time the link was lost during an update that nobody checked.

Make it easy for them to say yes. Tell them exactly where the link was, what it pointed to, and why it still helps their readers.

Send one follow-up after five to seven days if you hear nothing, and then move on. In one campaign documented by Ahrefs, 166 outreach emails recovered 31 backlinks, a success rate of about 19 percent.¹

What About Links You Paid For?

Keep a record of every paid link: the site, the page, the anchor text, and the date it went live. Checking those pages every month means you catch removals while the provider’s guarantee still applies.

Turn Unlinked Mentions Into Links

Link reclamation also covers mentions of your brand that never had a link in the first place. Journalists and bloggers often name a company, product, or study without linking to it.

Because the writer has already chosen to mention you, asking for a link is a small request. Our guide to unlinked mentions explains how to find these mentions and turn them into backlinks.

How Often Should You Do Link Reclamation?

For most sites, a monthly check is enough. Review the links lost in the past 30 days, fix any missing pages that still have links, and send outreach for the few that matter.

Always run a full check straight after a site migration, a redesign, or a change to your page addresses. This is when the largest number of links are lost at once, and nearly all the fixes are on your side.

Recovering Links Is Only Half the Job

Link reclamation protects the authority you already have. To grow your rankings, you still need a steady flow of new, relevant links from real sites in your industry.

Sources

External Sources

1

Ahrefs Link Reclamation: How to Find and Reclaim Lost Backlinks

How to classify lost links by reason, and the outreach campaign cited above that recovered 31 links from 166 emails.

2

Ahrefs At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead

Study of links pointing to more than 2 million websites, showing how many backlinks are lost over time.

3

Google Search Central Redirects and Google Search

Google’s guidance on permanent redirects and how they signal that a new page should replace an old one.

4

BuzzStream Link Reclamation: How to Find and Reclaim Links

Practical advice on checking page history and writing specific, non-accusatory reclamation emails.

5

LinkPanda Unlinked Mentions: How to Turn Brand Mentions Into Backlinks

Our guide to finding brand mentions without links and asking writers to add them.