Link reclamation means restoring backlinks that have disappeared or stopped working. The aim is to keep links you already earned instead of building new ones. Turning an unlinked brand mention into a link is a related tactic but a different one.
Why do links get lost?
According to reports, common causes are a link removed by the owner, a page deleted or changed on the linking site, a change on your own site that makes the linked page unreachable, a redirect or noindex on the linking page, and a domain that no longer exists. Backlink tools list such cases as lost links.
How does it work?
Two cases can be told apart. If an external link points to a page on your site that now returns an error, a permanent redirect to the matching target page helps. Google’s documentation says the indexing pipeline uses a redirect as a signal that the target should be canonical. If the link was removed on the other site, only a request to the owner can restore it.
Example
A trade portal linked to /guides/crawling. After a relaunch the page lives at /knowledge/crawling and the old URL returns 404. A 301 redirect to the new address makes the existing link usable again.
Anything that amounts to paying for the restored link falls under Google’s link spam rules.
Sources
- Redirects and Google Search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Spam policies for Google web search (link spam) – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Link Reclamation – Ahrefs blogahrefs.com
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