Backlinks are a crucial aspect of any successful SEO strategy. They help your website to remain visible on the search engine results page by increasing your domain’s authority. However, as time passes, it’s common to have lost backlinks due to broken links, expired content, or website migrations.
Losing backlinks can have a harmful effect on your website’s SEO performance. To retain your website’s visibility on the search engine results page, it’s essential to reclaim your lost backlinks through link reclamation techniques.
In this blog post, we will discuss some easy and effective techniques for reclaiming lost backlinks, and how you can implement them to strengthen your website’s SEO performance.
What is Link Reclamation?
Link Reclamation is a process of reclaiming broken links or lost backlinks to your website. The lost backlinks could be due to various reasons, such as a website redesign, expired content, and website migrations. The process involves identifying the lost backlinks and fixing the errors or problems causing their loss.
Link Reclamation helps to maintain domain authority and increases your website’s visibility on the search engine results page.
Easy Techniques for Effective Link Reclamation
1. Identify Your Lost Backlinks
The first step in link reclamation is identifying your lost backlinks. To do this, you will need to use an SEO tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush. These tools will give you a list of external links that point to your website. You can use this list to check for lost backlinks to your website.
Once you have identified lost backlinks, the next step is to determine why they were lost in the first place. The reason could be a broken link, expired content, or website migration.
2. Fix Broken Links
Broken links are the primary reason for the loss of backlinks. A broken link occurs when a hyperlink points to a page that no longer exists on your website. The easiest way to fix a broken link is by redirecting it to a relevant page on your website.
You can use tools like Broken Link Checker or Google’s Search Console to check for broken links. Once you have identified broken links, you can create 301 redirects to redirect the traffic to a relevant page on your website.
3. Re-create Expired Content
Expired content can lead to the loss of backlinks. If you have deleted a page or removed content from a page, any backlinks to that page will be lost. The best way to reclaim lost backlinks due to expired content is to re-create the content or recreate the page.
To recreate expired content, you will need to analyze your website’s analytics to determine which pages received the most traffic. Once you have identified the pages with the most traffic, you can create new content, or you can recreate the page, using the same URL.
4. Contact Webmasters
If your lost backlinks are due to reasons other than a broken link or expired content, you can contact the webmasters of the linking domains and ask them to restore the backlink.
Before initiating contact with webmasters, you will need to create a list of lost backlinks and the reasons for their loss. Once you have identified the cause of the lost backlinks, you can contact the webmasters and provide them with the necessary information to restore the backlinks.
5. Disavow Harmful Backlinks
Sometimes, you may come across harmful backlinks pointing to your website. These backlinks can have a detrimental impact on your website’s SEO performance. The best way to address harmful backlinks is to disavow them.
To disavow backlinks, you will need to use Google’s Disavow Tool. You can find the tool in Google Search Console. Once you have the tool, you can disavow the harmful backlinks by uploading a list of URLs or domains that you want to disavow.
Conclusion
Backlinks remain crucial to the success of any SEO strategy. Lost backlinks can have a detrimental impact on your website’s visibility on the search engine results page. However, using the techniques outlined in this blog post, you can easily reclaim your lost backlinks and maintain your website’s authority, and increase your visibility on the search engine results page.
By implementing these techniques, you can ensure that your website remains visible to your target audience and stays relevant in your industry.