Link reclamation

Receptional has developed a new link reclamation methodology to analyze and interpret links into a website and have built a process and web applications to help you reclaim links that are long since forgotten, turning them into new and improved visitors to your website.

Link reclamation is able to:

• Find links to pages that no longer exist
• Catch links your server does not resolve in an SEO friendly way
• Catch links that go through multiple redirects
• Find mistyped links on third party sites
• Build a 301 map to reclaim these dead links

If your web domain is not new, archive.org (opens in a new window) will probably show you that your website had previous iterations - earlier designs which have long since gone out of fashion. Over the years, most companies develop new websites - but a new website often means entirely new pages being created and old ones disappearing. Even if you think the content was the same, web developers tend to change technologies and to change the page addresses in the process. This is very frustrating for search engines and users alike, because people link to pages on your site which then disappear.

Until recently, the only way to see this would have been to examine your log files, looking for what is called a "404" (page not found) message. That only works if you have log files and can understand them. It does not work when the page is redirected to another page, which also redirects. This may happen more often than you think, particularly - oddly enough - when a company has been using best practices in SEO, by redirecting old pages as they come offline, to the most appropriate alternative content. Doing this best practice once is great, the second time you do it though, it is almost inevitable that you will confuse a search engine.

Receptional has a set of procedures to track down all these rogue inbound links that we can include as part of our link audit; this could give you a jump start that, in itself, may be worth considerably more than the cost of the audit.

If you would like more information on our link building, please fill in the web form.