Outreach & PR
Link Reclamation
The tactic of finding unlinked mentions of your brand or content online and requesting a link be added, turning an existing mention into a backlink.
What Is Link Reclamation?
Link reclamation is the practice of finding places across the web where your brand, content, images, or data are referenced or mentioned without a hyperlink, and then reaching out to the site owner or author to request that a link be added. It's considered one of the lowest-effort, highest-conversion link-building tactics available, because the hardest part of most outreach — convincing someone your content is worth referencing at all — has already happened. The publisher chose to mention you voluntarily; the ask is simply to complete that reference with a link. Link reclamation typically involves monitoring tools that track brand mentions across the web, filtering out mentions that already include a link, and prioritizing outreach on the remaining unlinked mentions based on the relevance and authority of the site. A closely related variant is reclaiming links lost to broken URLs — finding sites that used to link to a page that has since moved or been deleted, and asking them to update the link to the correct, current destination.
Why Link Reclamation Matters for SEO
Highest conversion-rate outreach
Because the publisher already chose to mention the brand, the ask is small and the acceptance rate tends to be far higher than cold link-building outreach.
Recovers otherwise-lost value
Unlinked mentions and broken-link mentions represent link equity that's genuinely available but currently unrealized.
Low resource cost relative to payoff
Monitoring and reclamation can often be handled with lighter tooling and effort than proactive outreach campaigns, for a comparable or better result.
A Simple Example
A design tool's marketing team sets up brand-mention monitoring and discovers a well-trafficked design blog referenced their tool by name in a roundup post but didn't link to it. A quick, friendly email pointing this out results in the blog adding the link within a day — a backlink earned with a fraction of the effort of a typical cold outreach campaign.
Best Practices
- Set up ongoing monitoring for brand and product mentions rather than searching manually and infrequently.
- Prioritize outreach on mentions from relevant, high-authority, or high-traffic sites first.
- Keep the reclamation request short, specific, and easy for the publisher to action.
- Also monitor for broken links to your own previously-linked content and request updates to the correct URL.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Treating link reclamation as a one-time project instead of an ongoing, low-effort habit.
- Sending vague or generic requests that don't specify exactly which mention and which link is being requested.
- Ignoring lower-traffic mentions entirely, when a quick request costs very little effort regardless of site size.
- Never checking for broken links to previously-earned backlinks after a URL structure change.
Key Takeaways
- Link reclamation converts existing unlinked brand mentions into backlinks.
- It typically has a higher acceptance rate than cold outreach, since the mention already exists voluntarily.
- It also covers reclaiming links broken by URL changes on your own site.
- Ongoing monitoring, not a one-time sweep, is the sustainable approach.