New SEO Practice To Try: Reclaiming Broken Links

by Abhinay Tiwari · October 27, 2017

The reclamation of broken links can potentially be another good SEO practice to incorporate into your overall SEO strategy, since it improves the overall quality of your efforts. If you are looking to try out something new and sift through your link building results, here’s what you can do to reclaim broken links:

Broken links usually result in 404 errors when a user clicks on them with the intention of accessing. They can happen either because of a mistype or because the pages they require access to have been discontinued on your website in favour of new ones or restructuring. To reclaim broken links, there are some sources you can use.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free to use and a relatively popular source for users seeking to attain link information regarding a website. If you have taken the time to explore Google Search Console, you will notice that it only tends to provide samples of links that Google will index for your website. Nevertheless, this is a good place to start when it comes to the SEO practice of reclaiming broken links.

Make use of the crawl function to generate a crawl errors report so that you will be able to take a look at the links through Google Search Console. Any 404 errors listed usually will display essential information like where it is linking from- you can then determine if the broken link stems from another website and if the post you are linking to still exists or not. If it is still existing, you can consider fixing the broken link by accessing your .htaccess file and rectifying it or setting up a 301 redirect so your website users will be redirected to important information.

Ahrefs

This SEO practice of reclaiming broken links can also be done with the SEO tool known as Ahrefs. When using Ahrefs, users will notice that the SEO tool comes with specific reports labelled broken backlinks. Here, they will find potential backlinks they can consider reclaiming. As a recommended SEO practice, users can further simplify their process by setting up a filter in Ahrefs to display only certain backlinks, like “dofollow” backlinks.

This allows users to apply more concentration to links that hold the highest conversion possibilities. Inspect the various different links to identify the source of the problem and make the relevant changes by redirecting and testing them out again!