Six-week plan
Lost backlinks: what to do in each of the first six weeks
A drop in your Ahrefs report is a symptom, not a verdict. This plan separates the links that moved, the ones that were removed, and the ones that never mattered.
Ahrefs, Semrush and Majestic crawl on their own schedules. A link marked lost may simply be a crawl gap. Open the linking page in a browser before you change anything.
Six weeks, one task each
Compare two exports
Download the lost-links list for the last 30 days and the list before it. Mark any domain that appears in both, since those are persistent drops rather than blips.
Open every top row by hand
Visit the page that used to link. Note whether it returns a 404, still exists without your link, redirects somewhere, or loads with your link intact.
Fix what is yours
Restore moved pages, redirect dead ones, and correct any typo in the URL a writer copied. Self-inflicted losses are the most common cause after a redesign or a CMS migration.
Send the first notes
Write to the owners of pages that dropped the link. Be factual: 'your article used to point to this guide, and I notice the link is gone'. Do not accuse anyone.
One follow-up, then a decision
Reply once to non-responders. At the end of the week, list the links you will not get back and note their approximate value.
Replace or accept
For the few that mattered, look for equivalents. For the rest, record the loss and carry on. Compare this month's report with last month's before drawing conclusions.
Why links vanish in the first place
Four causes account for almost every case. Pages get deleted, pages get edited, whole sites change platform, and sites sell or expire.
Editing is the one people forget. A journalist updates a story and drops a source. A blogger prunes old posts after a Google core update, such as the one in March 2024, because thin pages felt like a risk. Neither is hostile, and a polite note often restores the link.
Expired domains are different. When the site behind a link disappears, nobody exists to ask, and the only honest options are to find a replacement or accept the gap. Our broken-link guide covers the pages on your side, and the mention email round covers the writing.
Before you call a link lost
- Opened the page in a fresh browser window and searched it for your domain
- Checked whether the link now sits in a different paragraph or a nofollow attribute
- Confirmed the tool's last-seen date is more than one crawl cycle old
- Looked at whether your own redirects broke after a site change
- Read the replacement text, if any, to see whether the editor removed the link on purpose
When waiting costs more than replacing
Decide with a number. Estimate what the lost link was worth by looking at the traffic of the page and the organic visits it sent.
Short on time? If a launch, sale or campaign is within a month, six weeks of outreach may not fit. In that case a placement from $1 up to about $500 on a donor with similar authority is a defensible stopgap, while you keep asking for the old link. The reclaim-or-buy scorecard puts the choice into a table.
No tool or vendor can promise that a replacement behaves like the original. Google weighs each link on its own, and your Search Console links report is the only record of what it has actually seen.