Have you ever clicked on a link hoping to find useful info, only to be frustrated by a 404 error page? It’s annoying and can hurt your website’s reputation and search engine ranking.
But there’s good news!
I’m here to guide you through the link reclamation process. It’s a simple yet effective way to fix those broken links and improve your online presence.
What Is Link Reclamation?
The key to link reclamation is to use a smart approach to find and recover lost links.
Imagine a link to your website suddenly disappears. It’s up to you to get that link back.
First, figure out why the link went missing. Did the person in charge of the page remove it? Did the page itself disappear and show a 404 error? Maybe Google stopped indexing the page or it was redirected.
Remember, a link from a page that’s no longer indexed won’t help your site’s search rankings, even if it’s still there.
You need to understand what happened to choose the best way to recover your link and regain its benefits.
Why Is Link Reclamation Important?
Reclaiming links helps prevent your website from losing valuable link authority if pages move, links break, or URLs are wrong.
It’s more than just fixing broken links.
This process also helps you find and fix other issues like duplicate content, broken pages, and confusing site navigation.
Fixing broken links is a smart way to boost your website’s link strength. Broken links are frustrating for users and can hurt your SEO.
By repairing these links, you’re not only improving your site but also helping make the web better.
This is especially true for the links you control, as they help spread your site’s SEO benefits more effectively.
As anyone involved in SEO knows, getting new links can be tough. So, fixing the ones you already have is like grabbing easy wins.
Link Reclamation VS. Claiming Unlinked Brand Mentions
To boost your website’s visibility online, you can tackle broken links and unlinked mentions.
“Claiming unlinked mentions” means turning online mentions of your brand or business into backlinks. For example, if your brand is mentioned in an article or on social media but doesn’t link back to your site, you can reach out to the site owner and ask them to add a clickable link to your website.
On the other hand, link reclamation focuses on fixing links that used to lead to your site but don’t anymore. This might happen if a page was removed or if a website updated or rebranded, changing its URLs.
The goal is to find these broken links and fix them so they point to the correct page on your site again.
In this guide, we’ll focus on recovering broken links.
Also Read: How to Conduct Link Audit
How to Find (and Reclaim) Lost Links?
1. Find Broken Internal Links
To start finding broken internal links, you have a few good tool options.
For those on a budget, Google Analytics and Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider are great choices. The SEO Spider, for instance, lets you crawl up to 500 URLs for free, which is perfect for many small and medium-sized websites.
If your site is larger, you might want to check out paid versions of Ahrefs Site Explorer, Lumar, or the full version of Screaming Frog.
Let’s take a look at how to use Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider.
When you start a crawl, the tool will check every page on your site and check the links. After the crawl is complete, go to the ‘Response Codes’ tab.
Here, you can filter the results to show only client errors—those pesky 4xx errors that mean the links are broken.
Once you find these errors, you can prioritize fixing them. To dig deeper, you can click on a URL with a 4xx status code to see more details.
The ‘Inlinks’ tab at the bottom of the tool will show you where the broken link is on your site and how to fix it.
For larger sites or if you have many broken links, Screaming Frog allows you to export the list of problematic URLs to a CSV file. This makes it easier to track and manage your link repair efforts.
2. Fix Broken Internal Links
Next up is fixing the broken links on your website.
You’ll need to check every page that has these issues. Once you’re there, update or replace the broken URLs to get things back on track.
Sometimes, though, you might find a link that can’t be fixed. If it was pointing to content from an old website redesign that’s now gone, there might not be a good replacement.
In these cases, the best move is to just remove the broken link. It’s like decluttering—sometimes it’s better to get rid of broken things instead of leaving them hanging around.
3. Find Lost External Backlinks
Now that you’ve fixed the broken internal links on your site, it’s time to tackle missing or damaged external backlinks.
Fixing external links can be a bit easier because you don’t have control over them; you need the other website’s owner to help out.
To find broken backlinks pointing to your site, you can use tools like Majestic and Ahrefs Site Explorer. If you’re looking for a free option, the SEO Review Tools Free Backlink Checker is a great choice.
This tool lets you see up to 100 broken backlinks in each report. The best part? You can run the report again to find more broken links, up to a total of 100, once you’ve dealt with the first batch.
4. Reclaim Lost External Backlinks
Once you’ve found which of your backlinks are broken, it’s time to reach out to the website owners.
Just send them the correct URLs for your site.
They’ll likely appreciate the heads-up and will be glad to update the links on their pages.
It’s a win-win: you get to improve your backlink profile without having to find new links, and they keep their website up-to-date.
Reclaim Lost Links (& Claim Unlinked Mentions) with a Reverse Image Search
Images can be great for getting backlinks, but they can also lead to unclaimed mentions and broken links.
To fix this, use reverse image search tools like TinEye or Google Images. Upload your image or use its URL to find all the pages that use it.
Check each page to make sure your image links back to your website. If the image is correctly linked, you’ve got a solid backlink.
But if the image isn’t linked or the link is broken, reach out to the website owner and provide them with the right link for your image.
Pingback: Overcoming Challenges in Tiered Link Building