How To Reclaim Broken Backlinks: Auditing Your Link Profile for Broken Backlinks

Hey everyone, Adam here. Older brother at SEO Brothers. In today’s video we’re continuing our conversation on link profile and going to talk about reclaiming broken inbound links.

Most of us likely understands that when other websites link to ours that’s a good thing. It helps build relevance and authority.

However, what often happens is that after a few years, maybe after you’ve redesigned or restructured your website, those links often land on pages that no longer exist.

When this happens, the value of those links is significant diminished as they run into 404 errors and the flow of page rank stops.

Having a process in place where you audit your link profile to reclaim these links is important to keep your website performing well.

Now, my tool of choice for this is ahrefs.com. You can get some of this visibility in Search Console as well by looking at your 404 pages, but it’s a much easier process in Ahrefs.

I’ll run you through this quickly here. I’m going to choose a larger quasi government website that I already checked beforehand to make sure has some broken links so that this example wasn’t super embarrassing. Lets use NovaScotia.com.

Simply input your site into the Site Explorer, and head to Pages > Best By Links. From here you’ll want to filter your result based on HTTP code, selecting 404.

So as you can see here, there are well over 100 pages on novascotia.com that are broken, but still have links from other websites. That’s a fairly significant opportunity to recapture link equity.

From here, you’ll want to setup a 301 redirect document to map or redirect these old URLs to the most relevant page that currently exists – this will keep as much of the value as possible and will perform better than simply redirecting them all to the homepage.

You can invest a ton of time and money in trying to acquire high quality and relevant links. Don’t let a redesign or restructure be the cause of you losing those hard-earned links. Build this process into your consistent SEO checks.

Hopefully you found this helpful. If you have any questions about reclaiming external in-bound links don’t hesitate to reach out.

Hope everyone is having a great day and we’ll see you next week.