An old domain's 800 links were rotting in 404s — reclaiming them moved 30 keywords

An old domain's 800 links were rotting in 404s — reclaiming them moved 30 keywords

Word is a media site that migrated three years ago and never checked the old footprint. We ran their lost-backlinks report and found a graveyard.

What the audit showed:
— ~800 historic referring domains still pointing at old-structure URLs
— 60% of those landed on soft-404s or generic homepage redirects — equity diluted to nothing
— the strongest donor, a DR84 news org, linked to a dead article URL

The recovery, pure plumbing:
— mapped 140 of the highest-authority dead URLs to their closest live equivalents with 301s
— consolidated homepage-dumped redirects to relevant deep pages

The outcome: 30+ keywords gained an average of 6 positions over two months with no new links built — just equity re-routed to where it belonged.

The read: your biggest link opportunity might be links you already earned and are leaking. Audit lost backlinks before buying new ones. Watch this space.