What should I do if a high-value backlink is lost?

Modified on: Tue, 25 Oct, 2022 at 5:14 PM

It’s important to have backlinks from high-trust pages to improve your overall SEO ranking.

High-value backlinks can be lost for one reason or another. Siteimprove identify lost high-value backlinks in our SEO Advanced module.

We recommend you do the following if a high-value backlink is lost:

Does the link still exist? – Check if the source website is active, the page is still available and/or the backlink is present on the page.
Examine your target URL – Check that your target URL is still available? Is it accessible to robots? Is it still relevant for the backlink?
Consider a redirect - If the target page is not there anymore then is there another page that we can send this backlink to? If yes, then set up a 301 redirect from the old URL to a new one.
Is the content still relevant? - If the page still exists, but the content is no longer relevant, rewrite the content or find a more appropriate page to send the backlink to. Reach out to the owner of the backlink with a new URL.
Examine your source - If the source page is still there, analyze the content. Is the link still there? Was the source page removed? Was it just your link or the whole section of the page?
Reach out to the owner - If it was just your link, try contacting the owner of the page to find out why it was removed. Ask if you can do anything to get it back.

Learn more on backlinks

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