What Should You Do With Lost Backlinks?

What to do when you lose backlinks

Lost backlinks worry a lot of people more than they should. Link rot is a fact of the web: studies suggest a big share of links disappear within a few years. Google expects this churn, so the goal is not to keep every link forever. It is to recover the valuable ones and keep your overall profile healthy.

Why backlinks get lost

Links disappear for all sorts of reasons. The linking page might be deleted, the site might be redesigned or shut down, the content might be updated and your link dropped in the process. Sometimes your own page is the cause, having moved or returned a 404, which breaks the link. Other times an editor simply chooses to remove it. Knowing the reason shapes what you can do about it.

Find them and triage

Start by finding what you have lost. Backlink tools like Ahrefs and Semrush have a lost links report. Search Console shows which linking pages Google still counts. Combine a couple of sources, since each has blind spots. Then triage: not every lost link is worth chasing. Focus on the valuable ones, the relevant followed links from sites with real traffic. Ignore the low-quality ones. We cover finding them within a wider check in How to audit backlinks properly step by step. Keeping a light eye on lost links is part of sensible monitoring, covered in Monitoring backlinks without obsessing over DA.

Fix the technical losses first

Some lost links are easy wins. If your own page moved or now returns a 404, the link still exists on the other site but points nowhere useful, so set up a redirect from the old URL to the right page and the link is recovered. The same goes for redirect chains, which bleed link value as they hop along, as well as noindex or canonical issues on your side. These are within your control and worth fixing promptly.

Reach out for the editorial ones

Where a site has actively removed your link, reclamation takes a friendly email. Contact the site owner, explain the situation simply and make it easy for them by including the original link and the correct URL. If the loss was a technical glitch on their end, framing it as a helpful heads-up works far better than a demand. Reclamation outreach tends to succeed more often than cold outreach, since the relationship and content already exist.

Know when to let go and keep building

Some links are not worth recovering. If a site changed its policy on external links, shut down or removed a link for a genuine reason, chasing it is usually a waste of time. And if you lost a low-quality or spammy link, that is no bad thing. The most important habit is to keep earning new links, since steady link building naturally offsets the natural rate of loss. That ongoing approach is what we recommend in Backlinks over time vs one-off campaigns. Losing some value over time is normal too, as we explain in Do backlinks expire or lose value over time. Our Backlink Services team monitors and reclaims links as standard. The full method is in The Complete Guide to Backlink Building.