Broken Link and Unlinked Mention Reclamation Project

Reclamation is a finite job. On a retailer with a decade of history and two replatforms behind it, the recoverable set usually runs 40 to 120 linking root domains, and once recovered it does not regenerate next quarter. That is why this is a project and not a retainer, and why anybody offering it as a permanent monthly line is selling you the same audit twice. What is recoverable: Backlinks pointing at URLs that now return 404 or 410. Redirect chains left by a migration, especially the pattern where an entire old category tree was mapped to the homepage, which is technically a 301 and functionally a loss. Sitewide links dropped in a redesign, usually from a footer partner block nobody remembered was load-bearing. Equity split across de-DE, de-AT and .com by hreflang that was never reciprocal. Press archive pages that name you in text with no link. Image files hotlinked with a credit line and no href. Old campaign microsites parked on a domain that still attracts links and no longer resolves. How the redirects are decided: One at a time, against what the old page actually contained. We pull the archived version from the Wayback Machine, read it, and map it to the true equivalent. If a product is discontinued, the target is its replacement or the category, never a landing page and never the homepage. If neither exists we let the link go. A 301 to the homepage recovers nothing and adds a soft-404 signal, and we would rather hand you sixty real recoveries than two hundred redirects that do nothing but look busy in a spreadsheet. The tooling, so you know what you are paying for: Ahrefs broken-backlink and best-by-links reports as the starting set, cross-checked against the Search Console links export, because the two disagree and the difference is informative. A Screaming Frog list-mode crawl of every referring URL to confirm the link is still on the live page and to read its rel attribute. Thirty days of server or Cloudflare logs to find which dead URLs still take real referral traffic, since those get fixed first regardless of what any tool scores them. Ahrefs Content Explorer and Talkwalker for the unlinked mention set. Outreach, where it applies: Only where the mention is factual and a link would help the reader. We do not email an editor about a piece older than roughly two years. They will not touch the archive, and asking makes the next genuine pitch harder. For older mentions we approach whoever owns the CMS instead. Each request is one email, specific, quoting the exact sentence and the exact URL. There is no follow-up sequence and no second chaser. The fix on your side: You receive the redirect map as a CSV your platform can import, or as an nginx map file or edge worker rule set when the count outgrows the admin interface. We can hand it to your engineers or work in the repository if you prefer. Either way we re-crawl 21 days after deployment and report what actually resolved, because redirect maps get half-applied more often than anyone admits in the retrospective. Excluded: Disavow files. We will tell you plainly if the profile has a real problem, but disavow is not part of this work and is oversold generally. No new link acquisition. This recovers what you already earned. No replatforming advice, though we will read a migration plan before it ships if you ask. Do not hire us for this if: Your domain is under three years old with no migration history. There is nothing to reclaim and the audit will tell you so at your own expense. Say the site is new and we will point you at the press or study work instead.