Reclaiming links from dead URLs and uncredited mentions

On the last four replatformed sites we handled, between 71 and 88 percent of the referring domains we recovered came back from a redirect map, not from an email. Reclamation is a records problem first. Outreach is what is left after the records are fixed. The dead-URL half: We rebuild the historical URL set from the Wayback CDX index, your old sitemaps if anyone kept them, and the crawl-error and top-linking-pages reports in Search Console, then run the whole set through Screaming Frog in list mode against the live site. Every URL answering 404, 410, or a soft 404 dressed as a 200, and carrying at least one external link, becomes a row in the map with a proposed target and the reason for it. Where no equivalent page exists we say so and recommend a 410 rather than sending it to the homepage, which Google reads as a soft 404 and which quietly discards the link. This is where hospitality and property bleed. A hotel changes flag and the old property URL dies with fifteen years of guide links on it. A portal expires its listings on a rolling ninety-day window and every press article that cited a specific listing breaks at once. A furniture brand retires a collection and the decoration titles that covered it point at nothing. The unlinked-mention half: We build the mention corpus from news indexes and alerting on the brand, the legal entity name, every property or collection name including the ones you no longer use, the founder's name, and the phrase your releases use for your own index or ranking if you publish one. Then each mention is read. A mention inside syndicated wire copy is not worth an email. A mention in a staff-written piece where the writer clearly looked you up is. How we ask: One email, in the language the article was written in, to a named person, saying which sentence in which paragraph and offering the URL. One reminder after eight working days. Then we stop. We do not run sequences, we do not offer anything in exchange, and we do not ask a journalist to change wording. Correcting a fact you can prove is fine; asking for a favour is how a desk stops opening your mail. What comes back to you: The redirect map as a CSV your team can load into nginx, Cloudflare or whatever sits in front of the site, chain-checked and loop-checked, with the before and after status for each row. The mention register with the outcome per item, refusals included. And a short list of the five or six URLs on your site that attract links by accident, which is usually more useful than anything in the outreach column. Not included: We do not deploy the redirects. Your infrastructure, your change window, your rollback. We do not write replacement content for the pages that deserve to exist again, though we will tell you which three they are. We do not chase links on domains that have themselves been dead since 2019. Who this is not for: A site with no press history and no replatform behind it has nothing to reclaim, and we will say that on the call rather than sell you a project. The same goes for brands under two years old. This work pays on sites with an archive, and the older and messier the archive, the better it pays.