Most SEO teams spend 90% of their link-building budget chasing new backlinks and 0% recovering ones they have already earned. This is statistically backwards. Link reclamation has higher conversion rates, cheaper effort, and faster results than cold outreach.
This guide walks through the four categories of reclaimable links, exact email templates that get replies, and how to automate the monitoring so the work never piles up.
A site links to a page you deleted or moved without redirecting. Their link equity is wasted. Fix: 301 redirect the old URL or ask the linker to update.
A blogger writes about your product but forgets to hyperlink the brand name. Reclamation is a polite email asking for the link.
Someone uses your infographic, credits you in text, but forgets the hyperlink or links to a competitor by mistake. Reverse image search finds these.
Your old blog post used to live at /post-1, you moved to /new-post-1 without a 301, and the linking site never updated. The backlink technically still exists but passes degraded equity.
"yourbrand" -site:yourdomain.com for unlinked mentionsSubject: Quick note re: your [topic] article Hi [name], I noticed your article on [topic] links to [old-url], which now returns a 404. The updated version of that page is at [new-url]. Would you mind swapping the link? Happy to do the same for you any time. Thanks, [your name]
Reply rates we have measured: 38% on broken-link reclamation, 22% on unlinked-mention reclamation. Compare that to 2-4% on cold backlink outreach.
Our AI Watchdog monitors every backlink earned through the platform every 12 hours. If a link breaks, becomes nofollow, or gets removed, we email you immediately with the linking page URL and a one-click recontact flow. No more waiting 30 days for an Ahrefs report to catch the loss.
Start monitoring your links