How to Fill Gaps in your Backlink Profile!
No one likes to lose things. Say you lost your wallet, your toy truck, that evil girl in the playground who stole your best friend… Each of these lost things brought some form of value to your life, and now they are gone. But if you knew of a way to get them back you’d be silly not to go after them, wouldn’t you?
It hurts in similar ways when you run a report on your backlink profile and find out you’ve lost them or your competitor has been taking all the good links away from you.
But not all is lost after all.
Below are a few ways of identifying and getting back these lost links or filling in any link gaps seen through our competitors:
Moz has an easy to use tool on Open Site Explorer called ‘Reclaim Links’, which identifies broken pages on your site (these can be pages with 404 Not Found errors or 302 temporary redirects) that have inbound links. Pulling a report together shows you how many links you could possibly reclaim if you 301 redirected the error pages and also the number of links to the page therefore allowing you to prioritise any pages with more links than others.
Majestic allows you to find lost links, and even gives you a nice timeline graph of when the loss occurred. You will see a bit more information here, such as the referring domain, reason why the backlink was lost and how valuable the link was in terms of URL flow metrics.
Now, let’s look at what our competitors are doing.. Majestic’s Clique Hunter allows you to compare your site to 4 other competitors and see what links they have that you don’t, therefore identifying competitor link gaps. It’s useful information to know, especially helpful in terms of outreach because it shows valuable sites worth reaching out to.
Another useful Moz Open Site Explorer tool called ‘Unlinked Mentions’ gives you a breakdown of any mentions of your brand or product found online that you may be able to request a backlink from. This information is prioritised by domain authority, which helps when identifying the most valuable site to outreach to for the citation link.
