What Is Link Reclamation?
Link reclamation is the process of finding backlinks that are broken, lost, or pointing to the wrong place, and fixing them so the link equity they carry isn’t wasted.
How the Recovery Process Works
Links get lost for a few common reasons: a page you were linked to got moved or deleted without a redirect, a site restructured its URLs and broke inbound links in the process, or a webmaster mentioned your brand without linking at all (an easy outreach opportunity). Reclamation involves finding these instances — usually through a backlink audit — then either setting up a redirect, reaching out to ask the linking site to update the URL, or requesting a link where only an unlinked mention currently exists.
Tools Used
Backlink tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer or a broken-link checker can surface lost or broken links pointing to your domain. From there it’s largely manual outreach work: contacting webmasters, prioritizing the highest-authority lost links first, and fixing internal redirect issues on your own site that may be breaking links unnecessarily.
