Should you rebuild lost links or earn new ones?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 1 answer
- In a cluster of 7
Reclaim the lost links that were worth having and can be restored with little effort, then put the rest of your time into earning new ones. A reclaim is cheap because the hard part is done: someone already decided to link to you, and the link broke through a redesign, a moved page, or a URL change rather than a change of mind. A weak or unrecoverable lost link is not worth chasing at all.
Sort the losses first
| Why the link was lost | Can you recover it? | Action |
|---|---|---|
| You moved or renamed the page it pointed to | Yes, on your side | Redirect the old URL to the new one, which keeps the link working |
| The linking site moved its article and the link broke | Yes, if the editor acts | Send the editor the corrected URL |
| The linking page was deleted | Possibly | Ask whether a related page on that site could reference you |
| The site removed the link on purpose | Unlikely | Accept it, unless the removal was a mistake |
| The link came from a spam or paid source | Not worth it | Let it go |
The first row is the one to check before anything else. When you change URLs, links pointing at the old address keep sending visitors and credit only if the old URL redirects; Google’s site move guidance asks you to check the links to your site for pages with internal and external links before a move, so those URLs get mapped.
How to find lost links
Search Console’s Links report lists external links Google has found, but its help says it is a sample, limited to 1,000 rows per table, and that some listed links may no longer exist. Use it with a link tool that tracks lost links over time, and check your own 404 report for old URLs that still receive links: those are reclaims you can make without contacting anyone.
When to switch to new links
Once the recoverable, valuable losses are handled, the remaining effort belongs to new links. Losses that cannot be restored are better replaced by fresh coverage than chased with repeated emails. The test for which new links are worth the work is the same one any link has to pass, set out in when pursuing a link costs more than it returns. Before deciding, measure what the loss did, with what happens to rankings when a big backlink disappears.
A routine that keeps reclaiming small
When an update changes a URL, redirect the old address to its true equivalent in the same release, so links do not break on your side; a rewrite on the same URL needs no redirect, and a retired page with no equivalent can return 404 or 410. Review lost links monthly for the pages that matter to you. Send one short, specific message per recoverable link, with the old and new URLs, and do not follow up more than once.
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