Lost backlinks are links that a backlink tool found before and does not find any more. Majestic, for example, describes them as links that recently stopped pointing to your site. How long a link has to be gone before it shows up as lost depends on the tool.
Why do backlinks disappear?
According to reports, typical causes are a link removed by the site owner, a deleted or moved page on the linking site, a page on your own domain that now returns an error, a redirect or noindex on the linking page, and a domain that no longer exists. Some losses are temporary, for instance when the tool’s crawler could not load the page.
What can you do?
Sort by cause first. If the link points to a URL on your site that now returns an error, a permanent redirect to the matching new page is the usual fix. Google’s documentation says the indexing pipeline uses a redirect as a signal that the target should be canonical. If the linking site removed the link, only a request to the owner can bring it back, which is called link reclamation.
Example
A tool lists 40 new and 25 lost backlinks for March. For 12 of the lost links, your linked page returns 404 after a relaunch without redirects. Those are the quickest to fix.
Sources
- Redirects and Google Search – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Lost backlinks – Majesticpt.majestic.com
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