Link reclamation, and the mentions that never linked
Two different problems, and most brands have both. Links you earned that quietly stopped working. Mentions that named you and never linked at all. We inventory what is actually recoverable, tell you which items we will not chase and why, and invoice only for links that go live.
…teams we spoke to had moved to Your Brand within the quarter.
A redirect on your own server restores it. Nobody needs emailing.
Dropped in a CMS migration. Editor still active this month.
We hold a live paid relationship with this publisher. Not pitched.
You see the struck items and the reasons, not just the survivors.
Two problems that look identical on a link report
Link reclamation
Links that once existed and stopped working. A publisher redesigned and your URL now 404s. An editor removed the link in an update. A redirect chain broke during a migration.
The link was earned and it was real. Something in the plumbing failed.
Unlinked brand mentions
The opposite case. A journalist named you in an article and never linked. The coverage exists; the credit does not.
Nothing is broken here, which is exactly why this half is harder to recover than it sounds.
They arrive through different mechanisms and they convert at very different rates, which is why most pages on this topic cover one half and hand the other one off. A buyer does not experience them as two problems. They experience both as links that should be there.
One thing to clear up, because the terms get blurred constantly. Broken link building is a different tactic: finding somebody else's dead link and offering your page as the replacement. Same mechanic, different beneficiary. We sell that separately and this page is not it.
Five types, ordered by how likely each one is to come back
We publish no conversion percentage. Not on this page, and not in a proposal either. Nobody can verify a vendor's outreach rate before paying, so the number would be decoration. What we can give you is the order, and why each type sits where it does.
Backlinks pointing at your own 404s
Not invoicedSomebody linked to a page you later deleted, renamed or moved. Nobody needs asking. The fix lives on your own server, and a redirect restores the link without anybody outside your company being contacted. This is the largest category for most brands and the one we do not invoice for.
Links pointing at a wrong, old or misspelled URL
The link exists and resolves somewhere unhelpful. An old domain, a superseded path, a typo in the href. Some you fix yourself. The rest need a one-line note to the publisher, which is the smallest ask in the category and the one editors say yes to most readily.
Lost and removed backlinks
The link was live and is not any more. Recovery depends on why it went. A redesign or a CMS migration that dropped links is usually fixable. A link removed deliberately during an editorial update usually is not, and we will tell you which of yours is which before you pay us to write to anybody.
Uncredited image, chart and asset use
Somebody used your chart, graphic or research without linking. The ask is straightforward, because the publisher is technically in the wrong and usually knows it. Volume is low for most brands. For a company that has published original research, or a chart people keep reusing, this is occasionally the biggest category of the five.
Cold unlinked brand mentions
What the market sellsAn article named you and did not link. Nothing is broken and nothing is owed, so the editor gains nothing by editing a piece they already published. This is the category the whole market sells. It is also the hardest, and it works best when the mention is recent and the page is still being edited.
If you have migrated, rebranded or acquired, this is urgent
Done any of those in the last eighteen months without a link audit afterwards? That is the highest-return item on your SEO list, and it has nothing to do with brand mentions.
Most brands treat reclamation as cheap and optional. For one group it is neither.
A site migration, a domain change, a rebrand or an acquisition generates a large recoverable inventory overnight, and that inventory has a clock on it. Redirect chains degrade. Editors who would happily update a link to your new domain this quarter stop answering when the change is two years old and the article has scrolled out of their working memory. The window closes quietly and nobody notices until somebody runs the numbers.
For everybody else, this sits before the paid work rather than instead of it. Recover what you already earned, then decide what to buy — whether that is guest posting, link insertions or digital PR.
The raw export is not the opportunity
Any backlink tool will hand you a lost-links report in about ninety seconds, and every guide ranking for these terms will teach you how to pull one. That is not the work. The report includes items that are already live, items nobody will act on, and items we would refuse to pitch.
Manually confirmed against the live page
Backlink indexes lag. A link the tool calls lost is sometimes still there, and one it calls live is sometimes already gone. Every item is opened and checked by hand before it enters your list. False positives are struck at no charge.
Recoverable by you, or recoverable by us
Items your own developer fixes with a redirect are separated out and marked. You do not pay us for those. We tell you what they are, roughly how many hours they represent, and you keep them.
The page still has readers
A restored link on a URL nobody visits is a line on a report. We check the page's own traffic before spending an ask on it — the same standard applied everywhere else on this site — and it removes more items than anything else here.
The publisher is still editing
An article last touched in 2019, on a CMS the publisher has since abandoned, is a very long shot whatever the mention says. Recency of editorial activity predicts a yes better than domain authority does, and it is visible before we ask.
The ask is proportionate
Restoring a broken link is a favour that costs an editor thirty seconds. Adding a link that never existed asks them to defend an edit. We sort your items by what we are actually asking a person to do, and we work down from the cheapest.
What survives triage still goes through the refusals below. Those are the deductions that cost us money rather than you.
Some of your items we will not chase, and one of the reasons costs us money
Reclamation looks free because no publisher fee changes hands. It is not free. Every ask spends goodwill with an editor, and goodwill is finite in a way link inventory is not. Here is what comes off your list before we quote, with the reason attached to each.
Publishers we hold a live paid relationship with
We negotiate placements with many of the editors your mentions sit under. A free-favour email into that relationship costs more than the link is worth, and it costs it on your other campaigns rather than just this one. So we strike those items and we show you exactly which ones. It is the largest deduction on most lists, and it is the one a software vendor never has to make.
Anything that requires paying for the link
Reclamation carries no compensation of any kind. No fee, no product, no reciprocal link, nothing. If a publisher responds to a reclamation ask by quoting a placement price, the item is dropped and never invoiced. We will tell you it happened and what they asked for, and then we will leave it alone.
Hostile mentions and comparisons that rank you last
Some coverage names you in order to argue against you. Linking it sends readers to a page making a case you would rather they did not read, and asking for the link draws the writer's attention back to it. We flag these, we explain what each one says, and we do not pitch them unless you tell us to.
Sites we would reject as placement targets
If a page would not pass vetting when we were being paid to put you on it, a free link from it is not worth having. The standard does not loosen because the link costs nothing. Same list, same rules. This removes fewer items than the first refusal, and it is the one clients are most surprised by.
What we count, published before any number is
Per-item invoicing only works if both sides agree what an item is. So here is the rule, in advance. It is deliberately narrower than it could be, and every clause below removes something we could otherwise have billed you for.
One live link on one root domain
Counted when it resolves on the live page. Two links from one domain count once. A promise from an editor counts as nothing at all, however warm it sounded and however senior the person making it. We do not invoice on a reply.
Client-side fixes are not invoiced
Anything your own team recovers with a redirect is marked in the report and priced at zero, whether or not we were the ones who found it. We found it, you fixed it. Charging you for that would be billing you for an afternoon of your developer's time.
Attribute disclosed, and priced accordingly
A reclaimed link sometimes comes back with a nofollow, sponsored or UGC attribute, particularly on large publishers with a blanket policy. We report the attribute on every item. Attributed links are listed separately and not invoiced as recovered links.
Anchor and destination are not ours to choose
On every other service we sell, you specify both. Not on this one. The publisher decides, or the existing anchor is preserved exactly as it was written. If a specific anchor matters to you, reclamation is the wrong product for that link, and we will say so.
Live at thirty days, and no obligation after that
Items are re-checked at day thirty, and anything that dropped is struck from the invoice. After that we make no commitment. A reclaimed link carries exactly the risk that created your inventory in the first place, and we would sooner say so plainly than let you assume otherwise.
You pay for links that went live
This is the only thing we sell where the supply is fixed before we start. Every other service on this site draws on inventory that replenishes, because publishers keep publishing. Your recoverable items do not.
They are a finite pool determined entirely by your own history, and once they are worked through they are gone — which is worth knowing before anybody plans a budget around it.
A recovered link costs less than a bought one, and that is the whole basis for the rate. The cheapest placement we sell outright is $100 and a typical one is $200, because somebody has to write the article and negotiate the slot. Here the article already exists and somebody already put your name in it, so recovery is priced below our cheapest new placement.
There is no guarantee on this page. Per-item-recovered is invoice-on-delivery, so the payment structure is the risk reversal — and a twelve-month replacement window cannot apply to a link that was never bought.
One clarification, because the word is used for two different things. What FatJoe sells as brand mentions at $384 a placement, and SERPsGrowth at $4,000 for five, is newly published listicles and reviews. That is a different purchase and it is on our listicles page. This page is only about the mentions you already have.
The inventory audit
$500A fixed fee that returns the actual list: every item, sorted by type, with the struck items and the reason each one was struck.
Credited in full against recovery work if you proceed. You are paying for the triage and the refusals, because the raw export you can pull yourself.
Recovery
$125 / item recoveredNothing else. No retainer, no minimum, no setup fee.
When your pool is worked out the invoice goes to zero, which is the correct behaviour for a finite thing and the reason there is no contract to get out of.
On monitoring
Most brands: noNew mentions appear at a rate set by your own PR activity, not by anything we do. For brands with real ongoing coverage there is a standing arrangement worth having. For most brands there is not, and we would sooner tell you so during the audit than sell you a monthly fee against a trickle.
Who should not buy this
If your audit returns fewer than 25 recoverable items we will not take the recovery engagement, and we will refund the audit fee.
A brand with no press coverage, no migration history and a thin backlink profile has nothing to reclaim. The audit will come back nearly empty and we will have taken a fee to tell you so.
So there is a floor, and below it we refund rather than sell you outreach against a list that thin. What you need instead is coverage that does not exist yet, which is a different page.
There is a second limit, and it protects you more than it protects us. Reclamation outreach goes out under your name, to editors who did not ask to hear from you. Sent at volume it damages your relationships rather than ours, because we move on and you are still in that journalist's inbox. We cap contact per publisher and we spread sends over weeks. That makes campaigns slower. It is not negotiable.
What a brand mention is, and what it does for SEO
A brand mention is any reference to your company, product or domain in someone else's content. Linked mentions pass authority the ordinary way. Unlinked ones are the interesting case.
An unlinked mention is not worthless. Search engines have long been able to associate a name with an entity without a hyperlink, and a mention on a page your buyers actually read produces awareness whether or not anything is clickable. Being named in a well-read article is genuinely better than not being named.
It is also not a link, and the market has spent several years blurring that line. A mention does not pass PageRank. It does not move a page stuck at position eleven. If somebody has told you that mentions are the new links, ask them to show you the ranking change.
The reason to convert one is that the hard part already happened. Somebody wrote about you.
Link reclamation, answered
Can I not just run this myself?
The discovery, yes, in about ninety seconds. Every guide ranking for this term will show you how. What takes the time is everything after: opening several hundred URLs to see which ones the index got wrong, working out which items your own developer should fix, and writing to publishers one at a time. Plenty of teams do this in-house, and that is a reasonable choice.
What does it cost?
A fixed fee for the audit, credited against recovery work, then a per-item fee for each link that goes live. No retainer and no minimum term. Both numbers are published above. Because the pool is finite the total is knowable in advance, which is unusual for link building and one of the few genuine advantages here.
What happens when we run out?
The invoice goes to zero and we tell you. That is the correct outcome, not a failure. Your pool refills at whatever rate you earn new coverage, so for most brands this is a project rather than an ongoing service, and we would sooner set that expectation now than in month three.
What if the publisher asks for money to add the link?
The item is dropped and you are not billed for it. We pass on what they asked for so you have the information. Paying to have a link added makes it a paid link regardless of how the mention arose, and we are not going to route that through a reclamation invoice. If a paid placement on that publisher is worth having, it is a link insertion and it gets quoted as one.
What if the link comes back nofollowed?
It gets reported with the attribute shown and it does not count as a recovered link on your invoice. Some large publishers apply nofollow to every outbound link as blanket policy. Those links still send readers and they still sit next to your name, so they are worth having. They are just not what you bought.
What if the mention is negative?
We flag it, we tell you what it says, and we leave it alone unless you tell us otherwise. Asking for a link on a critical piece sends readers to the criticism and puts the article back in front of the writer. Occasionally a client wants it anyway, which is their call to make.
Is this the same as broken link building?
No. Broken link building finds somebody else's dead link and offers your page as the replacement, so the link is new. Reclamation restores or completes a link that was already about you. Same outreach muscle, different starting point. We price and sell them separately, and if your enquiry is really about the other one we will move it across.
Is this the same as a link insertion?
No. A link insertion is a placement we arrange and usually pay for, into an article that has nothing to do with you yet. Reclamation asks a publisher to fix or complete a reference they already chose to make. No fee changes hands here, which is the whole difference.
Do you guarantee anything?
No, and we do not invoice for anything that did not go live, which is the same protection without the wording. There is no guarantee on this page, no replacement window, no promise about what happens to a link after day thirty. What there is instead is a bill you only get for results.
Send us your domain. We will tell you what is recoverable.
You get the full inventory sorted by type, the items your own team should fix marked and priced at zero, the items we will not pitch with the reason next to each, and a number at the bottom. If that number is below our floor we will say so and refund the fee.
Every recoverable item, sorted into the five types
The items your own developer should fix, marked and priced at zero
The items we will not pitch, with the reason next to each
False positives from the index, struck at no charge
A number at the bottom — and a refund if it sits below the floor