What is Link Reclamation?

What is Link Reclamation?

It is the process of identifying, fixing, and replacing broken links that once directed users to your website. This includes both internal links within your site and external links from other websites. Simply put, it’s about reclaiming your broken backlinks.

Why Do You Lose Your Backlink?

There are several reasons why you have a high chance of losing at least 2% of your total backlinks each month or week. But what if this loss continues for a couple of years without any new links being added to your website?

You will notice a significant drop in traffic. In the current landscape, even if new backlinks are added each month, websites that remain outdated with no new content update still experience a decline in traffic. Therefore, it’s essential to regularly update both your website content and broken links.

Top Reason Why Your Links Break:

Website Removal: Sometimes, website owners may shut down their site or fail to renew their domain or hosting services. When a website is removed, all backlinks that website owned are considered lost or broken links.

Content Removal: During link-building campaigns, your team may engage in link exchanges or ABC link-building strategies to secure backlinks from high-quality content. However, adding too many links to quality content can impact its performance. When the content author notices this, they may remove all backlinks and retain only the essential ones to maintain a strong backlink profile.

Content Updates: Sometimes, authors update their content when its performance is not improving. In such cases, they may change the content’s intent, resulting in a complete overhaul of its structure and flow. As a result, all existing backlinks may be removed.

Why is Link Reclamation Important?

Link reclamation is just as crucial as building new backlinks for your website. Backlinks you acquired a month ago could disappear without your knowledge. Therefore, it’s essential to consistently monitor your backlinks using effective backlink management software to retain link equity and maintain your site’s authority.

Recovers Lost Link Value

Broken links do not pass any link equity to your website, negatively impacting your backlink profile. This effect depends on the performance and quality of the lost backlinks. Maintaining a balanced ratio of lost links to new links is a best practice in link-building strategy.

Link reclamation is a key approach to maintaining this ratio, helping you preserve link equity and improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings.

Maintains Backlink Profile Health

A healthy backlink profile is defined by key metrics such as average domain authority, domain rank, and the number of unique referring domains. Regularly monitoring these metrics ensures a strong backlink profile, which contributes to improved organic traffic.

Reclaiming high-quality lost backlinks helps maintain this diversity and strengthens your overall link-building strategy.

Enhances the User Experience

In general, both internal and external links are used on websites to enhance the user experience. When a user reads your content, internal links help them explore related material, ensuring they fully understand the topic you’re discussing.

External links are valuable when you reference statistical information or external sources, confirming the authenticity of your content. When these links are broken, users may lose direction in their reading, leading to a poor user experience.

Link reclamation is the only process that helps you address these issues and strengthen the health of your backlink profile.

How Does the Link Reclamation Process Work?

The link reclamation process begins by monitoring broken links. There are several ways to identify broken links on your website pages. The best practice for link reclamation is to automate the process to some extent, which helps streamline and simplify the entire procedure.

1. Monitor Ongoing Changes

It’s a regular part of any backlink-building strategy to ensure that the backlinks created are working and have not been altered. Typically, a team will create an Excel sheet listing all external links and monitor them one by one by clicking each backlink.

This is where automation becomes essential, as manually checking for changes every day is impractical. But how can we automate this process?

The automation process will differ for internal links and external backlinks. Regularly monitoring your backlinks and reclaiming lost backlinks will ensure that link equity is not lost over time.

2. Identifying Broken Links

Regular checks are mandatory to identify broken links, whether they are external backlinks or internal links. These issues must be addressed immediately by adding redirects or correcting the links.

Finding Lost External Backlinks

To find lost external backlinks, you need reliable backlink management software. Instead of manually adding backlinks to an Excel sheet, the software allows you and your team to manage and track backlinks more efficiently. It automatically crawls the target website pages to check if your link still exists without any changes.

Alternatively, you can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Google Search Console to track backlinks that no longer point to your site.

Finding Broken Internal Links

A regular site audit can automate the identification of broken internal links. Ahrefs Site Explorer provides a free audit with some page limits, which can be used to fix broken internal links.

These free audits show the total number of 404 errors within your website links. You can quickly identify and fix them as they occur.

3. Fixing Broken Links

When you find a list of broken links, categorize them as internal or external links and set priorities based on the quality of the content and target websites.

There are several approaches to fixing these broken links:

• If an external link you’ve used is broken, you can remove the link from your website.
• If an external website has linked to your site and their link is broken, contact them to reclaim the lost link.
• If an external website links to your page and you’ve removed that page, use a 301 redirect instead of allowing a 404 error.
• If an internal backlink is broken, fix it or remove the link.
• If an internal backlink points to a page that is no longer available on your website, remove the link or replace it with a link to another related page on your site.

This is not a one-time process; the completion of one cycle begins another link reclamation process.

Bonus Tips for Link Reclamation

Always prioritize high-quality links: Focus on reclaiming links from authoritative websites first. You can address lower-quality backlinks later.

Be patient and persistent: The link reclamation process is not a quick one. It may take time to get website owners to fix broken links. Be patient and keep records for follow-up.

Offer value in return: Consider offering to write a guest post or provide other value in exchange for fixing a broken link. Nobody will spend time on your broken links unless you offer something valuable in return.

Monitor your link profile regularly: Keep track of your link profile and identify any new broken links that need to be fixed. Use the best backlink monitoring tools to automate this process for you and your team.

By following these tips, you can effectively reclaim lost links and improve your website’s search engine rankings.