Link Reclamation After a Rebrand or Site Migration

After a rebrand or a platform migration we usually find fifteen to forty per cent of a site's historic referring domains pointing at URLs that return 404, redirect to the homepage, or pass through three or more hops. Most of that is recoverable inside a fortnight with a redirect map and no outreach at all, which is why this is the first work we do for a new client rather than the last. How the audit runs: Referring pages are pulled from Ahrefs and Majestic, from the Search Console links report, and from Bing Webmaster Tools, which indexes differently and reliably surfaces domains the others miss. To that we add your own access log, filtered to 404 responses carrying an external referer — the only source that shows equity being lost this week rather than at some point since 2019. Target URLs are then crawled in Screaming Frog list mode with redirect chains reported in full. How each loss is classified: Hard 404 and 410. Redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and which passes nothing. Chains over two hops. HTTPS targets still being requested over HTTP. Redirects landing on a noindex page. Query parameters stripped in transit so the destination is wrong. And the one people miss — a 301 to a page that exists but is not about the same subject, which is a redirect that works and a link that does not. The order we fix in: Server side first. A single nginx map file, a Cloudflare Bulk Redirects list, or whatever your CDN ingests, deployed once and effective the same day at no cost in relationships. Second, restoration: some 404s deserve the article back rather than a redirect into a category, and we tell you which by what still points at them. Outreach comes third, only where no equivalent page exists, and it is a short note to a named editor rather than a template. Unlinked mentions: Found through Ahrefs Content Explorer, exact-phrase operators across every name variant the organisation has used, and Talkwalker Alerts. Every mention is read before anyone is contacted. We do not ask for a link from a piece reporting a disciplinary matter, a dispute, a case the client lost, a redundancy round, or a critical review of a programme. Asking pulls an editor back to a page they had stopped thinking about, and in law and education that page ranks for the organisation's name. What this is not: This is not broken link building. We do not find dead links on other people's resource pages and pitch your article as a replacement. It converts at around one per cent and it spends goodwill with the same editors the press work depends on. Not worth buying if: Your site has never migrated, never rebranded and never pruned its archive. There is likely little to recover, and we will say so after the first look at your referring domains rather than take the fee. Sites under fifty referring domains are also below the point where this pays for itself. What arrives: The classified loss inventory as a spreadsheet, one row per referring page. The redirect map in whatever format your stack ingests. A restoration list ranked by the authority still pointing at each dead URL. The unlinked mention list, including the ones we excluded and the reason each was excluded. And a re-crawl thirty days after deployment confirming what now resolves and what did not take.