Given enough time, everything tends toward chaos.” It’s an inescapble law of thermodynamics you might have heard of, and applies to everything in the universe, including backlinks to your websites. And yet, some SEOs out there expect that, once completed, their optimization efforts will remain unspoiled and evergreen forever. What’s worse, they act surprised when those unrealistic expectations translate into rank loss and other adverse site complications. It doesn’t matter how well-executed and once- effective your SEO is; left unattended, entropy catches up eventually. This is something that becomes particularly evident with one of the most popular tactics we use to generate organic traffic and better rankings: link building. It comes in lots of names – backlink breakage, link rot, link death… But the long and short of it is that, after some time, your hard- fought link building strategy will waste away. And if you are not paying attention, its remains will negatively impact your site and work against you. So, let’s go over the topic of link death in a bit more detail, and see how the pros deal with it. Why Does it Happen? Putting high-brow musings on physics aside the fact is that those valuable backlinks you worked hard to obtain will eventually break as the internet moves on. Maybe its target website gets updated or outright removed. Sometimes host servers fail or get permanently decommissioned. Domain names change, registrations lapse or get transferred… I could go on enumerating the reasons, but the result is the same: many of our valuable backlinks will eventually be reduced to 404 error pages. And that’s if you are lucky and the link actually dies. Other – arguably more insidious – problems with link death come when they don’t entirely break but are instead rendered ineffective. Over time, new pages or posts push older ones away from the home page and direct viewer attention, thus reducing the amount of link juice they once supplied. So, in spite of your best efforts, you’ll always have a percentage of broken or ineffective links on your site to deal with. But not everything is lost. Let’s talk about how you deal with them. Here’s What You Do: Backlink Reclamation I first heard about the concept of link reclamation from Eric Ward, and the premise behind it is pretty straightforward: finding, fixing, and replacing online content from all the links on your site that no longer work. First task at hand is to check all 404 response codes on your site and see the nature of the link breakage. Tools like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and DeepCrawl help you do this nicely, but there are a few free alternatives out there that work as well. However you go about it, generate a list with whatever broken link (those returning 404 codes) pops up. It will act as your reclamation … Continue reading Backlinks Management: How to Deal with Link Death