Broken Link and Unlinked Mention Reclamation for Catalogs

A catalog trading for five years usually has somewhere between two and nine hundred URLs returning 404 or 410 that still hold live inbound links, and under a fifth of that is worth recovering. Nearly all of the value sits in a handful of pages: a discontinued hero product the press covered, a collection URL that died in a replatform, and a founder interview that moved when the site was rebuilt. The audit: Ahrefs best-by-links filtered to 4xx, cross-checked against the Search Console pages report and a Screaming Frog crawl run over a URL list assembled from the Wayback Machine and your old sitemaps, because a dead page with no internal path left is invisible to a crawl of the live site. Bing Webmaster Tools fills gaps in the referring-domain picture. Each candidate is scored on the referring page rather than the domain: does that page get traffic, is the link in editorial body copy, is the publisher still operating. Three kinds of loss: Retired product and collection pages, which for a beauty or apparel catalog means discontinued shades, sold-out drops, and season pages killed on a schedule. Unlinked mentions, where the brand is named in coverage that never linked out. And 404s on other people's sites where you already hold a genuinely better replacement page. What we fix in your stack, and what we email about: Most of this is not outreach at all. It is a redirect map, and it goes into your platform: a Shopify redirect CSV, a Next.js redirects config, or Cloudflare Bulk Redirects where the rule count outgrows the app. We map to the closest surviving equivalent, never to the homepage, and never through a chain. Where nothing equivalent survives, the honest answer is often to leave the 410 in place, and we will say that rather than build a page to catch a link. Outreach is reserved for unlinked mentions. Those emails go to the named writer or the desk that filed the piece: one short paragraph, the exact URL we are asking for, and a reason it helps their reader. Requests to editorial contacts convert at roughly fifteen to twenty-five percent, and far higher on pieces published in the last ninety days, which is why this becomes a monitoring job rather than a one-off sweep. What we leave alone: Links from expired-domain networks, scraped syndication, directory listings and comment fields. Recovering a bad link produces a bad link. We do not email publishers who strip external links as house policy. And we do not run the version of this where you email the owner of any dead resource in the category and offer a page written that afternoon. That is guest posting with extra steps, and it is not what we sell. What you receive: The redirect map as an importable file for your platform, the list of URLs we recommend leaving dead with the reasoning, the mention log with outcomes including refusals, and a monitoring setup so the next twelve months of coverage gets caught within a week rather than a year. We also hand over which of your internal links point at redirects, usually a longer list than the external one and free to fix. Who this is not for: Sites under about two years old with fewer than a hundred referring domains. There is nothing to reclaim yet and the money belongs in the campaigns that create links. Teams that cannot deploy a redirect file inside a month, because the audit ages. And anyone hoping reclamation substitutes for acquisition. On a healthy catalog this recovers real equity once, and after that it is maintenance.