Link Reclamation After Rebrands, Mergers and Catalogue Moves

Most of the links a manufacturer loses are lost to its own file moves. A rebrand, an ERP-driven catalogue migration or a plant closure breaks more inbound links in one afternoon than five years of ordinary link rot, and the damage stays invisible because nothing 404s for a visitor arriving through your menu. Where the losses sit: Old product pages under a retired model naming scheme. PDF datasheets that moved when the document system changed — which matters more in this sector than most, because engineers cite datasheets directly and those citations sit in forum threads, university course pages and standards commentary for a decade. Legacy domains from acquired companies, folded in with a blanket redirect to the new homepage, which passes almost nothing and tells Google the old catalogue simply ceased to exist. Microsites built for one trade show and quietly switched off. How we reconstruct what existed: The Wayback Machine's CDX API gives us the URL inventory of your site and of every domain you have absorbed, at the dates that matter. We diff that against a current crawl, against Search Console crawl stats and coverage, and against the broken-backlinks report from Ahrefs — which finds the links but not the pages that used to serve them. Where server logs reach back far enough we use those instead, because they show requests still arriving. The output is a one-to-one redirect map: each dead URL to the page answering the same question, 301 rather than 302, no fan-in to the homepage, and an explicit list of URLs that should return 410 because nothing on the current site replaces them. Model numbers: In industrial and freight the highest-yield search for unlinked mentions is not your brand name. It is your product model numbers, your pre-acquisition brand names, and the names of people quoted in trade press. A catalogue cited as "TR-4400 series" in a maintenance forum never surfaces in brand monitoring, and it is the citation most likely to convert, because the writer already treats you as the source. The outreach half: Where a redirect cannot fix it — the citation points at a competitor's mirror of your document, or the mention carries no link at all — we write to the person who published it with their own sentence quoted back, the correct URL, and nothing else. Roughly one in three of those requests to trade publications results in a link being added. At syndicated wire copy it is close to zero, and we do not send them. What we refuse: Redirecting a decommissioned domain wholesale to the homepage. That is the default your IT department will offer, and it discards the reason the domain was worth acquiring. Sending replacement suggestions to webmasters for dead links unrelated to your business; that tactic works at volume and burns the same editors we need for bylines later. Reporting a link as reclaimed before it renders in a fresh crawl. Not for you if: Your site has run for a decade under one domain and one URL scheme. There is real reclamation work on such a site, but it is a fraction of what a post-merger portfolio holds and the fee will not repay itself. Say so at the enquiry stage and we will tell you honestly. Reporting: Every recovered link comes with the live URL, the date it was verified, and whether it was recovered by redirect or by request. Redirect recoveries are the majority and they are permanent. Request recoveries depend on a person and can be reversed by the next CMS migration at their end.