Link Reclamation After Closures, Rebrands and Migrations

A freight brokerage came to us with 1,914 broken inbound links after two acquisitions and a portal migration. 1,631 of them were resolved by a redirect map written in nine days, with no email sent to anybody. 283 needed a human to write to an editor or a site owner, and 96 of those were fixed. Reclamation is mostly a records problem that gets sold as an outreach problem, and the pricing follows the wrong one. What breaks in this sector: Plants close and their pages go with them. Product lines get renamed after an acquisition and every part number in the old catalogue returns a 404. Datasheet PDFs — which is what trade press, university labs and procurement pages actually link to — move when the asset library is replaced, and nobody writes a redirect for a PDF. Distributor portals get consolidated. Careers pages migrate to a new applicant-tracking subdomain and take a decade of local news coverage with them. None of this shows up in a rank tracker. All of it shows up in the logs. Method: We start with the Search Console coverage report and the 404 list, then the server access logs, because logs carry referrer evidence Search Console does not surface. The Wayback CDX API tells us what each dead URL actually served, which is the step most audits skip and the one that decides where it should point. Ahrefs and Majestic supply the inbound links and anchors per dead URL, so we know what the linking editor believed they were sending a reader to. Then a decision per URL rather than a rule. Redirect to the nearest live equivalent where a reader still gets what they came for. Restore the page where nothing equivalent exists and the inbound links justify it. Return 410 and stop pretending, where they do not. Discontinued part numbers usually get a real page — status, replacement part, archived datasheet — because that page serves a maintenance engineer at eleven at night and keeps earning citations for years. Unlinked mentions: Trade press names companies constantly without linking: plant opening coverage, earnings roundups, capacity announcements, contract awards. Association member directories, standards committee rosters and conference speaker pages list companies as plain text. We monitor company name, brand names, product line names and executives' names, then write to the editor once, with the correct URL and a reason the reader benefits. One message. No sequence, no cadence, no merge field. We do not chase mentions inside negative coverage. If a title covered your recall, your OSHA citation or your litigation, that is not a link opportunity, and asking makes you the company that emailed a reporter about its own recall story. What you receive: The redirect map as a CSV your engineers can deploy. A page restoration list ranked by the links each page would recover. The correspondence log with every message and reply. On the standing engagement, a monthly report of links recovered and mentions converted, each with its URL. Not included: New link acquisition. Content beyond the restored pages. Deployment — we hand your team a file and verify the result; we do not push to your production environment. Who this is not for: Sites under roughly 500 referring domains, where the recoverable set is too small to justify the work. And anyone mid-replatform who has not frozen their URL structure. Reclaiming links into a scheme that changes again in six weeks is work you pay for twice.