Link Reclamation: Recovering Your Lost Link Value

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

If you’ve been doing search engine optimization for any serious amount of time, you’ve probably undertaken a link building campaign. In an effort to build a quality backlink profile, many SEOs focus almost exclusively on earning new inbound links. However, there’s an effective way to achieve some quick wins and top up that all important link juice; through link reclamation.

What is link reclamation? It’s the process of finding and fixing broken links pointing to your site, or replacing links that aren’t passing value as efficiently as they could. They could be links on your own site to internal pages or external links other people are using on their sites.

Link reclamation is a great opportunity. Not only do you get to take full advantage of links that already exist or are in your control, but you can also avoid building new links, which can be very difficult.

Leaky Internal Links

When reclaiming links, start with your own internal linking. You have control over these links, making them the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. Use a web crawler like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl to identify where you’ve got broken or dead internal links.

If you’re using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, filter your crawl results by Client Error to find pages returning 404 codes. Click on URLs, and then Inlinks in the bottom pane, to find all your internal links pointing to that page. If you’ve got a large site with a lot of pages and links, do a Bulk Export and then sort or filter the Excel file by status code.

While it’s possible to fix broken internal links via 301 redirects, it’s not necessarily the best way. You’re better off fixing the page or link to make sure you’re preserving vital link juice.

Note: You’ve probably heard that you should also consider reclaiming links that send users to a 302 redirect, because they don’t pass link juice. This is no longer the case: Google will treat a 302 redirect like a 301 when it comes to passing link equity.

Leaky Backlinks

Broken links

Finding and fixing broken backlinks is a bit more complicated than fixing your internal ones. The main reason is that you don’t really have any control over them. You’ll also have to know a some slightly advanced Excel functions, depending on how many pages and links you have.

Use a tool such as Majestic or Ahrefs to find sites that link to any pages that you may have moved or deleted. Export your backlinks into an Excel file and sort the list by importance — the name of this metric depends on what tool you’re using. Copy the list of URLs over into another Excel file and save it. Find the broken links by crawling the target URLs to Screaming Frog’s list mode. Filter the results by Client Error (4XX). No URLs showing? Congrats, you’re done. Otherwise, you’ve got some work to do.

Export your list of 404 error URLs back into Excel and paste the URLs and status code into your list of backlinks provided by your backlink tool (you could also paste them into a new sheet - depending on personal preference).

Use the VLOOKUP function to map the URLs to the status code. Now, just sort or filter your list by status code and you’ll be able to find all your broken backlinks. You can add a couple of columns for ‘date email sent’ and ‘date link fixed’ for tracking purposes.

Since some SEOs like to use multiple data sources, you can go through the same process using Crawl Error data downloaded from Google Search Console. If you’ve got a large site, this will take a bit more time because you will be dealing with a list of every broken URL, not just those that have been linked to.

Now that you have your list of broken backlinks, the link reclamation process at this stage is ideally as simple as sending the linking site owner a short email with the updated URL. When you do this, point out that updating a broken link improves the site’s user experience and SEO, making it a win-win situation for all involved. You should see a high conversion rate for these emails.

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by Sam Gooch via SitePoint