Reclaiming links: broken backlinks, unlinked mentions and old redirects

Most link building advice is about earning new links. Yet most established sites are quietly losing links they already earned. A page that collected links over years gets deleted in a content clean-up. A migration changes URLs and a few hundred redirects go missing. A product is renamed and its old URL starts returning 404. A journalist mentions the business without linking. Each of these is a link you had, or should have had, and recovering them is faster and more reliable than any outreach campaign for new ones.

Source 1: backlinks pointing to dead pages

When an external site links to a URL on your domain that now returns 404 or 410, the link no longer helps the rest of your site. Finding these is straightforward:

1. Export your backlinks from a backlink tool, with the target URL on your site for each link.
2. Check the status of each target URL. A simple loop with curl or any crawler in list mode works. Keep the ones returning 4xx, and also check redirect chains that end in errors.
3. Prioritise by linking domains. A dead URL with links from forty sites matters; one with a single scraper link does not.
4. Choose a destination for each: the replacement page, the updated version, or the closest relevant category. If nothing relevant exists, consider restoring the content, especially when the page had strong links.
5. Add 301 redirects and test them.

Search Console's Page indexing report also helps: URLs reported as "Not found (404)" that Google keeps requesting are often ones with external links. Your server logs show which 404 URLs are being requested most, by bots and by people following links.

Checking hundreds of target URLs quickly

If your backlink export has a column of target URLs, a short shell loop gives you the final status and destination for each one, which is all you need to sort the list:

while read -r u; do
  curl -s -o /dev/null -L --max-redirs 5 \
       -w "%{http_code}\t%{num_redirects}\t%{url_effective}\t$u\n" "$u"
done < targets.txt > status.tsv

Rows with a final code of 404 or 410 are dead targets. Rows with more than one redirect are chains worth shortening. Rows whose final URL is the home page, when the original was a specific article or product, are soft 404s that deserve a better destination. Sort the dead and soft-404 rows by the number of linking domains from your export and work from the top.

Source 2: redirects lost in migrations

Migrations are where links are lost in bulk. Redirect maps miss old URL patterns, a server change drops the old rules, or someone "cleans up" redirects a year later. Signs: a drop in referring domains in your backlink tool soon after a migration, a rise in 404s in logs, and pages that used to rank losing ground without any content change.

To audit:

• Take the list of URLs that had backlinks before the migration (from an old export, the web archive, or your backlink tool's history).
• Request each one today and follow redirects to the end.
• Flag anything that ends in a 4xx, a 5xx, the home page for unrelated content, or a chain of more than one hop.

Also check old protocol and host variants (http://, www) and old domains you own. Expired old domains are a classic leak: years of links pointing at a domain that stopped redirecting when its registration lapsed. The migration checklist covers how to avoid this, and the redirects guide covers chains and codes.

Source 3: unlinked brand mentions

When an article mentions your business, product, study or staff by name but does not link, the writer has already decided you are relevant. Asking for a link is a small request. To find mentions:

• Search for your brand name in quotes, excluding your own site, and for the names of your products, studies and spokespeople.
• Use alert services or media monitoring for ongoing mentions.
• Check coverage from any PR work; see the digital PR guide.

Then contact the author or editor with a short note:

"Thanks for including our winter houseplant study in your article on plant care. If it helps your readers, the full data and method are at [URL]. Either way, thanks for the mention."

Keep it gracious and optional. Some publications have no-link policies, and the mention still has value for brand recognition, both for search engines and for the AI systems that learn which businesses are associated with which topics; see entity SEO and brand mentions.

Source 4: links with errors on the linking side

Some links point to the right page but are broken on the linking site: a typo in the URL, a missing letter, an extra slash, an old http:// link that hits a redirect loop, or a link to a staging domain. Your backlink tool and 404 logs reveal typo URLs (for example /guides/hiking-boot-fitting when the real URL is /guides/hiking-boots-fitting). Two options: redirect the typo URL on your side (quick, entirely in your control), or ask the site owner to correct the link (cleaner, but slower). For frequent typos, do both.

Source 5: images and assets used without credit

Original photos, charts and diagrams are often reused by other sites without attribution. Reverse image search finds copies. Where your image is used without credit, a friendly request for attribution with a link is reasonable and often successful; where it is used on a site you would rather not be associated with, a takedown request may be more appropriate.

Do not forget your own internal links

While you are fixing external links, check internal ones too. Old articles and navigation menus often link to URLs that were later renamed or removed, so visitors and crawlers hit redirects or dead ends inside your own site. A crawl of your site lists every internal link with a non-200 target. Update those links to point directly at the final URL; it is the same value recovery, entirely within your control, and it improves the experience for every reader of those pages.

Prioritising the work

Task	Effort	Typical value
Redirect dead URLs that have backlinks	Low; all on your side	High for URLs with many linking domains
Fix migration redirect gaps	Low to medium	Often very high after a migration
Redirect common typo URLs	Low	Moderate
Ask for links on unlinked mentions	Medium; needs outreach	High for respected publications
Ask for image credits	Medium	Variable

Start with the first three, which depend only on you. Most established sites recover a meaningful number of linking domains in a day of work, and the redirects keep working for years without further effort. Outreach for unlinked mentions can then run alongside other link building, a few emails a week, without becoming a project of its own.

Preventing future losses

• Never delete a page with backlinks without a redirect. Make the backlink count visible in your CMS or content inventory so editors see it before removing anything. The pruning guide builds this into the process.
• Keep redirects permanently, in one place, under version control if possible.
• Renew old domains and keep them redirecting.
• Check after every change. A quarterly run of the dead-URL check, plus a full one after migrations, keeps the leak small. Running the SEO checker on the home page also confirms host and protocol redirects still work, which is where many sitewide link losses start.

Measuring

Record the number of linking domains pointing at dead or broken URLs before you start, and again a month after fixing them. Your backlink tool will show recovered links as the redirects are recrawled. Rankings for the destination pages may improve gradually as search engines process the redirects; the effect is usually largest for pages that received several strong links from the recovered URLs.