Anna Kaleta8 October 2020|~7 min read

SEO

GUIDE

OFF-PAGE SEO

What Is Link Reclamation and How Can It Improve Your SEO Results?

What is link reclamation, why you should invest your time in reclaiming backlinks and what benefits it will have for your SEO

How many times have you looked at your website's backlink profile, and you've spotted a number of lost links from external sources? As a digital marketing specialist, I see newly discovered and recently lost backlinks all the time, some which contain a lot of spammy content and others which we wish to reclaim due to the great value and quality.

Link building isn't an easy task no matter if you are doing it on your own or appointing someone to fulfil the task for you. It usually takes time and money to gather good quality links from websites with high domain authority (DA) scores. This means that you should always keep an eye on already existing connections between the external sources and your website as if you will lose quality backlinks it might negatively affect DA and rankings of your website. In this case, you should start the process of Link Reclamation to ensure you can recover backlinks and so the link juice is delivered to your website.

What is link reclamation and why should you do it?

Link reclamation is a procedure that contains finding, fixing and/or replacing the links which are broken and links to your website. Link reclamation does not only refer to external sources (backlinks) but also to broken internal links on the website.

The main reason why you should perform the link reclamation process is to ensure your website is not missing any opportunities when it comes to passing the link juice across your internal pages as well as through backlinking. It also allows you to keep your website well maintained as you routinely crawl your website and remove any technical issues on the internal pages or redirect them if they no longer exist.

Unlinked Mentions vs Link Reclamation

In this section, we need to discuss the difference between link reclamation and unlinked mentions, both important and with a similar process are often mistaken as the same thing but in reality they are very different.

When it comes to gathering unlinked mentions, you are going to generate new connections between your website and a page which mentioned your business. This process does not include reclaiming previously lost or incorrectly linked pages, at the same time link reclamation relates to the previously existing connections between your and another website which has been lost over time. The link reclamation process can also be used to fix broken internal linking on your website.

Finding & Fixing Internal Links

As an SEO specialist I always try to keep the websites free of internal linking issues, I tend to focus on 2 main issues:

• Internal 301 redirects
• Error pages with 4xx status

To find out whether your website has these sorts of issues I would recommend using Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool which allows you to crawl your website for free if it has 500 or fewer URLs.

To check whether your website has any 404 error pages follow these steps:

1. Open your Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
2. In the top URL space, provide your website URL and click 'Start'
3. Go to the 'Response Code' section (top navigation or right-hand side navigation window)
4. Choose 'Client Error (4xx)' from the dropdown list
5. Go to the 'Inlinks' tab and locate internal links which lead to the page
6. Replace incorrect internal links with a new suitable URLs in your CMS

Screenshot from Screaming Frog Tools

To find internal 301 redirects follow the same instructions, however from the dropdown list choose 'Redirections (3xx)' instead of 'Client Error (4xx)'.

Finding & Claiming External Links

Once your website is clear of any internal linking issues we can move on to finding and claiming lost backlinks. This is crucial as high-quality backlinks can give you a great DA boost, which basically tells how trustworthy is your website. I also suggest maintaining your backlink profile on a regular basis to ensure you are not losing any opportunities.

To properly check your backlink profile you might want to use one of the popular paid services such as Majestic, SEMrush or Moz Link Explorer. Moz Link Explorer will show you a list of links which your website lost recently, this is a very convenient solution for those who are busy and don't have too much time to analyse the results.

Once you have a list of backlinks that have been lost and you wish to reclaim then you can begin the reclamation process.

You can try to reclaim the backlinks by contacting the website/business owners and provide them with a correct link to your website. In most cases, people who manage the website will appreciate your message as you help them keep their website well maintained too.

Benefits of Link Reclamation

Even though link reclamation might sound like a hassle, it provides a great and cost-effective way to build your backlink profile. At the same time, the quality links that direct traffic to your website will improve your SEO and your site authority.

Once you successfully reclaim one of the links to your website, it will not only give you another link to the portfolio but also can have a direct effect on your ranking position as Google and other search engines will treat your website as more trustworthy.

Remember that not every backlink is worth your time, and if links contain the spammy content and a high toxicity score I would not recommend reclaiming this particular link as it might negatively affect your results such as domain authority.