# Lost backlinks

Category: [Link Building & Off-Page](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/link-building-off-page/) › [Backlinks & link profile](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/category/link-building-off-page/backlinks-link-profile/)

**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.

## Related terms

- [Link reclamation](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-reclamation/index.md)
- [Backlink](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/backlink/index.md)
- [Broken link](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/broken-link/index.md)
- [Link rot](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-rot/index.md)
- [301 redirect](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/301-redirect/index.md)
- [Link profile](https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/link-profile/index.md)

## Sources

- [Redirects and Google Search – Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects)
- [Lost backlinks – Majestic](https://pt.majestic.com/reports/site-explorer/lost-backlinks)

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Last updated: October 7, 2026
URL: https://seo-geo-glossary.com/en/glossary/lost-backlinks/