Link Reclamation After Catalogue Migrations and Rebrands

On the last catalogue migration we audited, a pump manufacturer moving from a static site to a PIM-driven one, 61 percent of the external links pointing at the old site landed on a 404 or on a blanket redirect to the homepage. The redirect map had covered the category pages properly. Nobody had checked which URLs the trade press and the distributors had actually linked to, and the answer was the datasheet pages. Where the losses are: Not in blog 404s. In discontinued SKUs, superseded datasheets, a pressroom that moved from /news/ to /media/, an old .it domain parked after a group rebrand, and PDF technical documents that were linked directly and then reissued under a new filename. Those pages carried links from distributors, standards committees, university department pages and trade titles, which are the sources hardest to earn a second time and the ones nobody thinks to check before a launch date. Reconstructing the old URL map: The Wayback Machine CDX index for every path the old site served, cross-read against archived sitemap files and, where it survives, the pre-migration crawl somebody saved. We rank the dead paths by the quality of what points at them rather than by how many links they hold. Search Console's crawl error report comes last, not first: it shows what Google has revisited recently, which is a small and misleading subset. Redirects come before outreach: Most of the recovery here is a redirect map your development team ships, not a mail campaign. A discontinued product goes to its successor page, with a line on that page explaining the succession, never to the category listing and never to the homepage; a redirect to a page that does not answer the original request is treated as a soft 404 and passes nothing. Where no successor exists we will tell you to build the page, and we will also tell you when a link is not worth a page. Mentions worth converting: Association member registers that name you without linking. Standards committee documents and technical reports where the mention sits inside a PDF, where the ask is not a link in the PDF but a line on the HTML landing page that hosts it. Tender award notices. Distributor sites showing your logo with no href. Trade articles that name the company in the body text. We write to the person who can actually edit the page, meaning the association secretary, the section editor, the distributor's marketing contact, in their own language. Rebrands and acquisitions: Industrial groups here rename constantly after an acquisition, and the retired brand keeps its inbound links for years. Two rules we have not had reason to break: do not let the old domain lapse, and do not blanket-redirect it to the new homepage. Page-to-page mapping recovers most of the value; the blanket redirect recovers very little and cannot be undone once the old crawl signal has gone. Out of scope: New link acquisition. Sequences and follow-ups, because a three-touch drip to an association secretary in Bergamo earns a reputation a company keeps for years. We write once, to a named person, and if the answer is no we record it and stop. We also decline this work where you cannot ship redirects inside the engagement window; the audit is worth nothing sitting in a sprint backlog behind a checkout rebuild. Not for you if: Your site is three years old, has never migrated, has never been rebranded and has no retired catalogue. There is nothing to reclaim and we will say that on the first call rather than sell you an audit that confirms it. Equally, if the previous agency already ran a reclamation pass this year, ask them for their list before you buy ours.