Link reclamation for rebranded and migrated property sites

On a hotel portfolio or an agency site that has been through one migration, this work usually restores between thirty and a hundred links that already exist. Nothing here is new acquisition. It is finding the editorial links you were given and then broke, and the places where a journalist wrote your name and did not link it, and repairing both before spending a euro on outreach. The three sources of loss: Migrations. A rebrand, a platform move, a property sold and renamed after refurbishment. The old URLs were redirected in a hurry to the homepage or to a category, and a redirect to a page that does not answer the original one is treated as a soft 404, which drops the signal as surely as a dead link. Chains. Two hops accumulated over three replatformings, often ending on a 302 that has been temporary since 2019. And silence: coverage that names you without a link, which in travel and property is most coverage. How they get found: Referring URLs from Search Console, Ahrefs and Majestic go through Screaming Frog in list mode, resolving the full redirect path and the final status code, so what comes back is not a 404 list but a map of every hop. The Crawl Stats report and the server logs supply the rest: the log referrer field catches links no backlink index has ever seen, which on a hotel site is typically local press and association pages. For mentions, exact phrase queries across the brand, the founder, former property names, the architect, the collection names, plus a standing monitor. Old names matter more than current ones. A hotel that traded under another flag for a decade is still cited under it. What gets fixed: A mapping file, referring URL to the single best current target, with a reason per row, because the point is not to make a 200 appear but to send the link somewhere the citing writer would recognise. That ships as an nginx map block or a Cloudflare Bulk Redirects CSV, applied in one pass rather than a hundred one-line rules. Then the mentions worth an email: one message to the person whose byline is on the piece, naming the paragraph and offering the correct URL, and no follow-up. Editors update or they do not, and chasing them costs the relationship. Not included: The broken link play, where you find a dead resource on somebody else's site and pitch your page as its replacement. It works occasionally and it burns the same editor contacts I need for real work, so I do not run it. No new content built to be the replacement asset. No monthly link report; this engagement finishes. What it is measured against: Referring domains resolving 200 to a relevant page, before and after, and the count of mentions converted to links. Both numbers are small and both are real. If the recovered set is under twenty domains I say so at the audit stage and you can stop there, paying for the audit only. Who should not buy this: A site three years old that has never migrated, never rebranded and has no press history. There is nothing to reclaim and the honest answer is that you need the study or the editorial work instead. Also not for a portfolio where each property sits on its own domain with no shared history, since the reclamation surface is a fraction of the audit cost per site.