Broken Link and Unlinked Mention Reclamation After a Relaunch

Two jobs live under this heading and they are not the same work. A broken inbound link is an engineering problem: a relaunch lost the URL, and the fix is a 301 written to the right target. An unlinked mention is an editorial problem: a journalist named you and did not link, and the fix is an email from a person with a name. We sell them together because in German property, travel and furniture the relaunch that broke four hundred inbound links is usually the same relaunch that broke the credit line under the press photo. Finding the broken ones: A Screaming Frog crawl gives the 404 and 410 inventory. That gets joined against the referring-URL export from Ahrefs and the top-linking-sites list Search Console will hand over, and then against your server log. The log is the source most audits skip and the only one that proves a dead URL is still being requested by real referral traffic this month, rather than by a crawler with a long memory. For every dead URL with links pointing at it we pull the archived copy through the Wayback CDX API, because what was on the page decides whether the right answer is a redirect or a restored page. Where German sites break specifically: Umlaut URLs that were percent-encoded in 2016 and transliterated in 2021. TYPO3 relaunches that dropped the .html suffix. The /de/ prefix deleted when a site went single-language. Press releases under /presse/ moved to a subdomain nobody redirected. And the blanket redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and which quietly discards the equity of every link it was meant to rescue. Where no equivalent page exists, we will tell you to let the link die rather than send a reader from a 2019 market report to a category page. Unlinked mentions: We monitor the brand, the named spokespeople, the study titles and the product names across German trade and regional press, then read each hit. A mention inside a paywalled trade piece from an editor who covers your sector is worth an email. A mention in a scraped aggregator is not, and we do not send it. The email goes to the person who wrote the piece, in German, from a named editor at this desk, and it says what the link would give the reader. Roughly a third of the ones we send get a link added; the rest cost nothing but the sending. What we refuse: We do not do broken link building on other people's sites. Crawling resource pages for dead outbound links and pitching your page as the replacement is a volume game with a reply rate near two per cent, and what it wins is a link on a page with no readers. We do not ask editors to add a link to a piece that was critical of you. We do not send follow-up sequences to journalists: one email, and if the answer is silence the answer is silence. Chasing a Redaktion three times is how a client's name gets filtered. Timing and dependencies: This work needs someone on your side who can deploy a redirect map. If redirects require a quarterly release train, say so at the start and we will scope around it, but the reclamation half of the value sits behind that deployment. Who should not buy this: Sites under three years old with no press history and no migration behind them: there is nothing to reclaim yet, and we would be charging you to confirm that. Brands that have never been written about by anyone they did not pay. And anyone who wants this counted as a link acquisition channel with a monthly target, because the inventory is finite by definition and the honest version of this engagement ends.