How SaaS Companies Can Recover Lost Backlinks

A backlink you earned two years ago from a respected SaaS publication doesn’t stay there forever. Domains expire, articles get rewritten, URLs change, and migrations quietly break links that once worked fine. Sometimes a publisher removes a link during a content update, and you don’t notice until months later, once traffic has already started to slip.

For SaaS companies, this adds up fast. One lost backlink won’t hurt your rankings overnight, but when valuable links disappear month after month, you lose referral traffic, brand exposure, and some of the authority those links were passing to your site. If you’re new to SEO or want to better understand what are backlinks and why they matter, it’s worth understanding their role before trying to recover lost ones.

An Ahrefs study covering nine years of link data found that 66.5% of all backlinks it tracked were dead, roughly two out of every three links. Even recent content isn’t safe: Pew Research’s 2024 analysis of nearly a million webpages found that pages published less than a year earlier already had an 8% failure rate.

The good news is you don’t always need to build a replacement from scratch. When the referring page is still live and your brand is still relevant, link reclamation can win back a backlink you’ve already earned, often faster and cheaper than earning a brand-new one.

Why SaaS Companies Lose Backlinks

Backlinks disappear for a few predictable reasons. SaaS websites change constantly, companies rename products, remove old features, restructure documentation, and launch redesigned sites. If another site is still linking to an old URL, that backlink can suddenly point to a 404 page without anyone on either side noticing right away.

The same thing happens on the publisher’s side. An editor updates an old software comparison, removes outdated references, or replaces one product with a competitor’s during a routine content refresh. Sometimes it’s not even deliberate a site migration to a new CMS, a switch from HTTP to HTTPS without proper redirects, or a bulk cleanup of “old” content can wipe out links that were never meant to be touched.

Common causes include:

• URL changes without a redirect
• Deleted or rewritten content
• Website migrations
• Renamed or removed SaaS pages
• Publishers simply cleaning up old links

Some backlink loss is completely normal, no backlink profile stays static forever. What actually matters is knowing which losses are worth the effort to recover, and which ones aren’t.

How to Find Lost Backlinks

The first step is a proper backlink audit. Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Majestic can identify backlinks that were once live but no longer are, usually through a dedicated “lost backlinks” filter. For each one, check the referring domain, anchor text, the date the link was lost, and the overall quality of the linking site before deciding it’s worth chasing.

Don’t focus only on how many backlinks you’ve lost focus on which ones. A link from a relevant SaaS publication with real organic traffic is worth recovering. One from an unrelated directory with little authority usually isn’t worth the time.

Google Search Console can add useful context here too, but it isn’t built as a historical lostbacklink database the way dedicated SEO tools are, so it works better as a secondary check rather than your primary source. Once you’ve built your list, visit the referring pages yourself. Seeing exactly what happened to a rewritten article, a dead domain, a simple removed link tells you what kind of fix you’re actually dealing with.

Broken Backlinks vs. Lost Backlinks

These two terms get used interchangeably, but the distinction matters for how you approach recovery.

A broken backlink means the referring page still exists, but the link itself points to something dead on your website often because a SaaS company renamed or deleted a feature page while other sites kept linking to the old URL. If there’s a relevant replacement page on your site, a 301 redirect usually fixes this instantly, with no outreach needed at all.

A lost backlink is a different situation entirely: the link itself is gone because the publisher removed it, rewrote the article without it, or the referring site went offline completely. This is where actual outreach and reclamation come in. Worth watching alongside both of these are unlinked brand mentions where a site mentions your company by name without linking to it not technically a recovery case, but a real opportunity to turn a mention into a link.

How to Recover Lost Backlinks

Once you’ve identified your lost backlinks, the next step is figuring out which ones can realistically be recovered, and in what order.

Find out why it disappeared:

Open the referring page and check whether the article still exists, whether your company is still mentioned in the text, and whether the link was simply removed during an edit. This single step tells you whether you’re dealing with a quick fix or a dead end.

Fix your own side first: 

If you deleted or renamed the page that received the backlink, add a proper 301 redirect before doing anything else. There’s genuinely no point asking a publisher to update a link that still points to a dead page on your own site.

Prioritize by value:

Focus your limited time on editorial links from sites with real traffic and an audience matching your target market. One relevant industry publication is worth more than several random high metric sites with no real connection to your niche.

Contact the publisher:

Keep the message short, explain exactly what changed, and hand them the correct URL so there’s no extra work on their end. This approach genuinely works. A case study from IDX found link reclamation emails succeeded around 26% of the time, compared to roughly 8.5% for average cold outreach.

If your backlink profile has built up over several years, this process can get time consuming fast. In that case, a dedicated link reclamation service can handle the research, prioritization, and outreach on your behalf, which is often worth the cost for teams with limited internal bandwidth.

SaaS Backlinks Worth Recovering

Some backlinks deserve extra attention because of how SaaS companies tend to earn them in the first place. Integration and partner pages are good example products that connect with CRM platforms, payment tools, or analytics software often get listed on partner directories, and these listings quietly disappear the moment a redesign or partnership change happens.

Software comparison and roundup articles are another category worth chasing. Pages targeting searches like “best CRM software” or “best project management tools” get refreshed constantly, and a product that was once included may still be a strong reclamation opportunity if the reason it dropped off wasn’t quality-related.

Original research, case studies, and technical documentation also tend to attract links worth protecting longterm. API guides and developer resources in particular often earn links from other software companies and industry blogs, since they get referenced repeatedly in technical writing.

US and European SaaS Backlink Recovery

If you target both US and European customers, don’t judge lost backlinks by geography alone. A US technology publication may reach American buyers effectively, while a European SaaS or business publication may carry more weight with audiences in the UK, Germany, France, or the Netherlands. Judge each link by the publication’s actual audience, topical relevance, and editorial quality, rather than assuming one region’s links automatically matter more than the other’s.

The recovery process itself stays largely the same in both markets: identify why the link disappeared, fix any technical issues on your end, and reach out to the publisher when there’s a genuine chance of restoring it.

Preventing Future Backlink Loss

Recovering lost backlinks is useful, but preventing avoidable losses in the first place is even better. Before deleting or restructuring an important URL, check whether other sites are linking to it, and redirect the page instead of removing it without a replacement.

Website migrations deserve particular care. Before moving to a new CMS or changing your URL structure, review your important backlinks and make sure every redirect is mapped correctly, ideally as part of the migration checklist rather than an afterthought. It also helps to set up ongoing backlink monitoring on your most valuable referring domains, so you can catch and act on a lost link while the publisher’s content is still active and easy to fix.

Final Takeaway

Backlinks naturally disappear as SaaS websites and the wider web keep changing. Products get renamed, URLs get restructured, and publishers remove outdated content as part of routine maintenance. But losing a backlink doesn’t always mean losing the opportunity for good.

The key is identifying which lost backlinks are genuinely valuable, understanding why they disappeared, fixing problems on your own site first, and reaching out to publishers when recovery is realistic. Treated as an ongoing habit rather than a onetime cleanup, link reclamation protects the SEO value you’ve already earned, while your newer link building efforts keep adding to it.