Recover lost backlinks

Most lost backlinks are lost for reasons that have nothing to do with the linking site changing its mind: the page they pointed at was deleted or moved on your side. Those come back with a redirect and no email. This playbook separates those from the ones that need outreach and the ones that are gone for good.

Steps

1. Pull the backlinks with recency. ahrefs.backlinks with the site as target, mode: "subdomains", limit: 1000. Each row has the source URL, the target URL on the site, anchor text, the source domain rating and traffic, first and last seen dates, and link type.

2. Define lost. A link whose last_seen is older than 60 days is treated as lost; within 30 days is alive; between is uncertain. State the cutoff. Ahrefs recrawls busy pages often and quiet pages rarely, so a stale date on a tiny site is weaker evidence than one on a large site.

3. Prioritise. Sort the lost list by source domain rating, then by source traffic. The top 20 to 30 are worth diagnosing individually; the rest get a summary.

4. Diagnose each of the top rows with your own browsing. Fetch both the source URL and the target URL.

   • Target URL returns 404 or 410, or redirects to the homepage: the loss is on your side. Restore the page or 301 it to the closest live equivalent. Highest return, no outreach.
   • Source URL returns 404: their page is gone. Usually unrecoverable; note it and move on.
   • Source URL is live and the link is gone, or now points at a competitor: outreach. Note what replaced it, since that is the pitch.
   • Source URL is live and the link is still there: Ahrefs is stale, not the link. Mark it as a false positive and do not count it.

5. Report. A table of lost links sorted by source DR: source URL, target URL, anchor, DR, source traffic, last seen, diagnosis, action. Then two lists: your URLs to restore or redirect (with the number of links each recovers), and the outreach list with the specific page and the reason the link was worth having.

Gotchas

• Stale is not lost. Step 4 exists because a large share of "lost" links in any index are simply not recrawled yet. Report the false-positive rate you found.
• Redirect to the equivalent page, not the homepage. A homepage redirect keeps the link but loses the relevance, and Google treats mass homepage redirects as soft 404s.
• The 1000-row cap is the top slice on large sites. Say so, and offer to rerun with mode: "prefix" on a section of the site.
• Nofollow links are worth recovering too when the source has traffic; they send visitors even if they pass no authority.
• Do not promise a ranking change from recovered links. Report what was recovered and what to watch.