What is Link Reclamation – How to Claim Your Lost Links?

Link reclamation is when you go online and find people mentioning your brand online on their websites. Subsequently, you will kindly reach out to them when they have mentioned your brand and ask them if you can have a link back to your website because they have mentioned your brand already.

Many web owners and editors are happy to do this because it is seen as adding value to their users by linking to the source that they have mentioned. Overall, it is worthwhile to try this method of link-building because it can be quite successful and quite an easy way to get some additional links to your website. 

What is Link Reclamation – Reclaiming What You Have Already Done 

Typically, when talking about link building, we usually refer to new links. But – today – let us talk about the inks that you already have and how to make sure you are getting value from them. Link reclamation is essentially the SEO version that is about the process of reclaiming what you already have.

We are referring to the process of reclaiming links that were once passing equity to your website. You already have links, so it would be a waste if you didn’t get equity from them, right? The value from these links might have been diluted or lost entirely due to a number of reasons, such as the following:

• Perhaps the redirects are wrong.
• Perhaps they never got added. 
• Perhaps you updated your site and moved the resources.

Maybe – it is just because we all are humans, and things can happen. 

Link Reclamation is Not Building New Links 

While link reclamation isn’t technically building new links, it is a quick win and totally legitimate, provided that the links aren’t of low quality. Restoring broken links can also yield much more value than other link-building efforts compared to the time invested – since the links are already in place. 

How to Identify Internal Broken Links

There are a few issues that you can start sorting out right away:

404 Errors

404 Errors occur when a user or a bot attempts to access a page that doesn’t exist. It is usually caused by a page either being removed or moved to another URL without putting a redirection in place. It can also be triggered by a link that points to an invalid URL. 

Up to one thousand 404 errors can be exported at a time from your Google Search Console account – or – if you want to get technical, one thousand errors per geo-target subfolder – if several properties have been created at this level. 

Other tools can also help you identify internal broken links on your website. The best thing is that 404 errors are easy to fix by updating links that no longer work. 

How to Regain Lost Backlinks

It can be a pretty quick process for internal links that you have control over, but it might be harder when the broken link is located on another site. Ideally, you can just contact the linking site and ask them to update the new URL – but if this isn’t possible – you can simply add 301 redirects to redirect the equity and users from the old URL to the new one.

Ahrefs and Majestic both help you spot a broken or deleted link and give you an idea of why broken link is bad. This aspect can be incredibly useful for investigating the cause of the missing links in order to have them fixed or replaced. It is important to use the 301 redirects when permanently redirecting one page to another. 

Other redirects might look like they are sending everything to the new page – they don’t pass link equity – so the new page won’t benefit from the ranking power of the old page. 

How to Develop A Strategy to Reclaim Links

Before you do anything, having a well-thought-out strategy is incredibly important. By having a strategy in place, you can ensure that your efforts are effective and targeted. As you work on your strategy, ask yourself the following questions:

• What are my goals?
• What are the specific links or sites of interest?
• What type of content would be most interesting?

The answer to these questions will prove a good starting point for developing your strategy. 

Things to Consider for Link Reclamation

There are a few important things to consider when link reclamation that we have listed below:

Timeframe

The golden rule is as follows: the sooner you start the process of reclaiming any lost links – the sooner you will start to see results. The time frame depends on the situation. We know that launching a new website will take time before links start pointing to your website. So, patience is the key here.

On the other hand, if you have removed a page or changed the URL, then taking action is mandatory. 

Identify the Missing Links

For effective link reclamation, you need to identify the links that are missing. The following tools will help you to do the needful:

Google Analytics

You can use this free tool to track the traffic of your website. You can also use Google Analytics to assess where your visitors are coming from and which links they have clicked to get to your website. 

Screaming Frog

This is another free tool that enables you to crawl your website and find broken links. You can use this tool for both – MacOS and Windows. 

SEO Review Tools

This SEO tool is ideal for link reclamation SEO and will show you all potential links pointing to your website. 

Majestic

This tool is available in a paid version and will enable you to see all links pointing to your website. 

DeepCrawl

This is another paid SEO tool that enables you to find any broken links by crawling the website. 

Tineye

You can use this free tool to search for images by their URLs. With the help of this tool, you can find websites that have utilized your images without linking to them. 

Google Reverse Image Search

You can leverage this free tool to search for images by their URLs.

How to Find Lost Links with Google?

The first thing you should do is understand how to search for your brand on Google without showing results from your own website. 

Type Your Brand Name/ Keyword in Double Quotes

You should use Google’s search operators, type in your brand name, and put them in double quotes. 

The reason why you should use double quotes is because this is a Google search operator that will allow Google to only return results where your brand name appears in that order specifically. 

Place a Minus in Front of Your Website Domain 

The next thing that you want to do after mentioning your brand name is also another operator that will stop Google from returning results from your own website or from any website you like. The way you can do that is to put a minus (-) – the same way you do a minus on the calculator in front of a website domain. 

What this will do is that Google won’t show results, including your website or any social media profile that you don’t want to include in the results, such as Facebook or YouTube. You get the point – you can do “minus” anything – but the idea is to really narrow it down so it is just publications and actual websites that are non-social networks or your own website in order to find your brand name. 

Assess the List of Sites that Mention Your Site/ Brand 

Now, at this point, you should feel confident that when you hit enter, you will come up with a list of websites that mention your brand’s name on the web that aren’t your own websites or social media websites. 

Now, you have a list of websites that mention your brand on Google. You might open an article where you have been quoted, or your brand might have been quoted. Now, this is a perfect example of link reclamation.  

Ask Website Owners for Links

The underlying idea is that now you have seen that your brand has been mentioned on a website, but they don’t have a link going back to your website. Now, if you see this – you know that this is the perfect opportunity for you to ask for a link. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are guaranteed a link. 

But if you keep using this recover lost backlinks strategy over and over again, you will eventually get some links back to your website. 

• Find out who owns this website
• Find out who wrote the article
• Reach out to the blogger directly 

You already know that when another website links to your website – that is a good thing as it helps build authority and relevance. It is also good for overall domain visibility in the organic search results. 

What Causes Lost Links?

Often, what happens is that over the years or perhaps over a website redesign or restructuring – these sorts of inbound links start pointing to pages that no longer exist on the website. Now, when this happens – the value of those links significantly diminishes because they run into a 404 or not found error, which essentially stops the flow of PageRank to the rest of your website. 

This aspect indicates why having a process in place to review these external links is such a significant part of keeping your website performing well organically. 

Keep Analyzing Your Website with the Right Tools

There are countless tools to choose from, such as Ahrefs, that you can use to get some visibility within the Google search console.

But – it is a lot easier to examine and audit your link profile filtered by status code within the Ahrefs.com tool. 

When using this tool, you will see that it will bring up a list of pages on your website that are most popular based on the number of external inbound links that they receive. From here, you are going to filter this result based on the HTTP status code – selecting 404 page not found. 

You can select a few other different status codes as well to examine them, but the 404 code will be the most popular one. 

You might see hundreds of pages that are broken but still receive links from other websites. Now, if you look at it, you will see that this is a fairly significant opportunity for reclaiming lost links based on all of the external inbound links. 

Map Old URLs to Appropriate Existing Pages 

From here, you should set up a 301 redirect to document and implement some redirects based on these broken or outdated URLs on your site. It is incredibly important in this process to map the old URL to the most appropriate page that currently exists on the website.

So, if the link goes to an old and outdated service page, make sure that it gets mapped to the most appropriate updated service page version. Similarly, if it is going to a product or a category page – make sure you do this redirect based on relevance so that the authority and relevance of those inks can be best recaptured. This will give you more benefit than if you simply just redirect all of these URLs to your homepage or just recapture them all to a single page.

Final Thoughts 

Needless to say, when it comes to what is link reclamation, you can invest a ton of time and money in acquiring these high-quality and highly relevant external inbound links to your website. So, do not allow a website redesign or restructure to be the primary reason that you lose out on all of the value in this hard work that you have done in the past. 

The best thing you can do is to build this into a standard process, whether it is monthly or quarterly – something that you review consistently to make sure that you stay on top of the broken external inbound links. 

FAQs

What is SEO Link Reclamation?

Link reclamation in SEP involves the aspects of identifying and restoring broken or lost backlinks. This way, you can boost your website’s authority and increase its authority in SERPs.

Why Does Link Reclamation Matter?

The simple rule is that lost links indicate lost value, which is why reclaiming lost links is essential for maintaining your website’s authority and boosting your search visibility. 

Is There A Way to Find Broken Links?

You can leverage SEO tools, such as Google Search Console and Ahrefs, to identify lost or broken links. These SEO tools can identify external links that are no longer pointing to your website.