Link Reclamation for Sites That Rebranded or Merged

A firm that has rebranded, merged or replatformed in the last five years is usually sitting on recoverable links it can restore without sending anybody an email. Across the last eleven audits this practice ran, the median was 340 referring domains still pointing at URLs that no longer resolve, and 61 percent of them came back through a redirect map handed to the client's developer. Outreach recovered the remainder, at about one reply in five. Anyone pricing a reclamation project by emails sent has the work backwards. How the inventory is built: Ahrefs broken backlinks and the 404 rows out of Best by Links, then Majestic's historic index for domains Ahrefs has aged out, then the Wayback CDX API to reconstruct what your URL structure looked like before each migration. That last step is what turns a list of dead URLs into a redirect map, because you cannot map to a destination you cannot identify. Search Console crawl stats supply the 404s that still have live referrers. Every candidate linking page then goes through Screaming Frog in list mode to confirm the link is still on the page and still followed, because index lag means a real share of what any backlink tool reports has already gone. Unlinked mentions: Exact-match searching on Google and Bing, Talkwalker alerts backfilled to the start of your mention history, and a manual pass over outlets that covered you during periods when nobody internally was watching. These convert at roughly one in five when the article is live and maintained, and at close to nothing when it sits in an unowned archive. They are ranked on that basis and we do not chase the archive. What gets discarded: Scraper sites, expired-domain networks, comment and forum spam, directory shells, and anything a partner would be embarrassed to see in a report. Also anything nofollow or UGC, counted separately and never as recovered. In the most recent audit run, 41 percent of what the tools called recoverable was discarded at this stage. That discard is the actual product: the difference between the list a tool prints and the list worth acting on. What ships: A redirect map as CSV, one row per dead URL with a destination and a reason, loops and chains already resolved, formatted for nginx, Cloudflare Rules or whatever sits in front of your site. A prioritised outreach list with a named contact per target, ordered by whether the page is maintained. The outreach itself, written per target and per journalist and never templated across a list. Then a re-crawl at sixty days confirming which links now resolve, which redirects were implemented wrong, and which never came back. What we refuse: We do not email four hundred webmasters. Outreach goes only where there is a named editor and a maintained page, typically thirty to sixty targets out of several hundred candidates, and a wider send burns both the sending address and your firm's name. We do not offer to write anything in exchange for a fix. We do not touch disavow files without a manual action in Search Console, because most disavows we inherit have removed live and useful links, and undoing one takes longer than the original mistake. Who this is not for: Sites that have never migrated, never rebranded and never merged. There is nothing to reclaim, and you will be told that in the scoping call rather than sold an audit that finds thirty links. Also not for anyone who wants us to implement the map. We do not take production access to client infrastructure and do not want it. Out of scope: New link acquisition, content, and technical SEO beyond the redirect layer.