Did you just find some dead backlinks and now you are wondering if can you recover them? Recreating broken links is a crucial part of search engine optimization, especially for the sake of continuity. It’s not necessary to recover every broken connection, though. Let’s dive into the importance of link reclamation for SEO. We will also talk about how to do it properly.
Do you know what link reclamation is?
We have to start from the beginning right? This is a good place as any. If you ever checked our blog you noticed that we at Link Department always explain every little detail and give you enough reading material to keep researching. If you haven’t checked by now is a great time to do so. Now let’s get back to our little guide. Reclaiming lost as well as broken links that should be pointing to your website (but something went wrong) is known as link reclamation. Both inbound and outbound links can fall into this category, and they go by the name “dead links.” To clarify, internal links are those that lead to another webpage on the same website/domain, while backlinks are those that come from another website entirely.
The importance of recovering your dead backlinks
It’s pretty easy to understand the importance. Restoring broken links helps keep your link equity intact. That is always a plus, right? The value of interlinking for search engine optimization (SEO) is referred to as link equity (some even call it the link juice), which occurs when one page transfers its value and authority to another through inbound links. When you recover broken links, you can keep the SEO juice flowing from links you’ve worked hard to build and acquire. You don’t want your hard work to go to waste. When pages with plenty of backlinks are fixed, the link equity can then be passed to other pages.
Reclaiming links also reduces the likelihood that site visitors will encounter a 404 page. The error page or 404 if you would like ultimately benefits the user experience. As you work to reclaim lost links, you may find other problems. Broken links or duplicate content are just some of those problems. Fixing that will boost your site’s search engine rankings and natural traffic. Now you need to find out a little bit more about broken link building.
Tools you can use
Don’t worry, there are always tools you can use that can help you. Some of them are even free. Your wallet will thank us later. Our top two favorites are Google Search Console and Dragon Metrics. So, maybe you can start with those and keep researching other tools later? Of course, if you start having any difficulties you can always call us to help you. We are here for you.
Common challenges you will encounter
Fixing what you can control—internal links—is a good place to start before attempting to persuade a third-party website to update its content. That can be tricky because you never know who is on the other side. They might not be willing to cooperate and help you. Although you may expect some external site owners to update their own content to include your link, this is not always the case. To effectively reach out to them, keep the following in mind:
- Be courteous and never aggressive.
- Don’t bother people unless you really think your link will improve their content
- If you want them to link back to you, you need to make your content better (where it is lacking)
Those are just a few tips we had for you. It can be helpful. You will need to keep researching this topic even after you are done reading because things keep changing often in this field.
404 error or otherwise known as broken links (a quick guide to recovering your own dead backlinks)
You, as the site’s owner, are responsible for fixing any broken links, so that’s where we’ll focus our attention now. To begin, let’s find all the dead links you might have on your site. To find out which URLs are sending users to 404 pages, you can use Google Search Console (as we already told you) and the Index Coverage Report. However, Google Search Console can only report on pages that have already been crawled, so any pages that haven’t yet been discovered or crawled will not be reflected.
Dragon Metrics’ Site Auditor function reveals all the problems with your website. That obviously includes pages with 4xx errors, making it another useful tool for finding broken links. Site Auditor by Dragon Metrics is capable of crawling up to a million pages and categorizing problems into high, medium, and low priority categories. After locating the faulty connections, it is necessary to repair them. Depending on the root cause of the 404 error, you may need to take a variety of measures.
How to repair damaged internal links
Bringing back a deleted page is the best solution if it was deleted in error. Instead of sending visitors to a famous 404 error page if they try to access an old URL for a page that has since been renamed, use a 301 redirect. Finding and updating all impacted internal links to the new URL will help eliminate the need for redirects. It is important to track down any internal links that lead to pages that have been removed as a result of content consolidation and update them with the URL of the most relevant alternative resource or landing page.
Because building links is so time-consuming, it’s crucial to make the most of the ones you already have by reclaiming them. There is no need to have any dead backlinks if you can do something about it. However, not all broken links need to be fixed. In fact, low-quality backlinks could actually hurt your SEO if you try to get them back. Instead, put your energy into building high-quality links that are more likely to be recovered.