Why backlinks disappear: the seven ways a link gets lost

A lost backlink is a link that used to point to your site and no longer counts. Either the page is gone, the link was taken out, or something changed so that search engines ignore it.

It happens far more often than most people expect. Ahrefs sampled 2,062,173 websites and found that 66.5% of the links pointing to them since January 2013 had rotted (study, updated February 2024). This guide explains the ways a link gets lost, which of them you cannot see by looking at the page, and how to lose fewer of the links you paid for.

Why backlinks get lost

Ahrefs broke the lost links down by reason. Two reasons account for most of them.

Two notes on reading it. "Dropped" means dropped from Ahrefs' own index, not from Google's: Ahrefs says pages may be dropped because they can no longer be crawled or indexed. And Ahrefs lists crawl errors as a reason but does not count them as rot, because the page may be back the next day.

The seven ways a link gets lost

1. The page is deleted. It returns a 404 or a 410.
2. The page redirects. Often to the home page after a redesign. The server answers, but your link is not on the page the visitor lands on.
3. The link is removed. Someone edited the article, or the site cleaned up old outbound links.
4. The link becomes nofollow. The publisher added rel="nofollow", sponsored or ugc. The link is visible, but it is no longer the followed link you agreed.
5. The page is set to noindex. The page asks search engines to leave it out of their results.
6. The canonical changes. The page now names a different address as the original. If your link is not on that one, it is lost.
7. The page drops out of the index. Nothing changed on the page that you can see. It is simply no longer found in search.

Links you earned and links you paid for

If a link was earned, losing it costs you ranking strength. If you paid for it, losing it also costs you money, and you have someone to ask.

That changes the priority. A paid guest post that lost its link after six weeks is worth one email today, to a vendor who still remembers the deal. A year later you have less to stand on. Linkody's case study on monitoring notes that PayPal's guarantee lasts only 180 days, while site owners tend to guarantee a bought link for a year (source).

For paid links, how soon you notice decides how much you can still do about it.

How to find out which of the seven happened

There are two ways to look, and they answer different questions.

A backlink index such as Ahrefs or Semrush has a "lost" report for your whole profile. It is the way to find lost links you did not place yourself. It is slower for links you bought, because it only sees a change when its crawler comes back to the page.

A direct check opens the exact pages you care about and looks for your link. For each page, check five things:

1. Does the page load, with a 200 status and no redirect?
2. Is your address still in the page source?
3. Does the link carry nofollow, sponsored or ugc?
4. Is there a noindex, and does the canonical point to the page itself?
5. Does the page show up when you search Google for site: and its exact address?

You can do this by hand once a month with a list. Our free backlink tracker template gives you the list, a status per link and the money at risk. For one page at a time, the dofollow checker and the noindex checker read the source for you.

What to do about each one

Keep the email short. Say what you paid for, when, what changed and what you want, and name a date. The full process, with three email templates you can adapt, is in how to find lost backlinks and get them back.

How to lose fewer links

• Agree in writing whether the link is followed and how long it stays. What to check when a paid link is delivered has the list.
• Record the date you paid until, and set a reminder two weeks before.
• Check new links weekly for the first two months. A problem found then is the easiest to get fixed.
• Track the rot rate per vendor, and stop buying from the worst ones.
• Count lost links as a cost. How much link building costs shows what they do to your price per link.

By hand, or automated

Checking 20 links once a month is manageable in a spreadsheet. At 100 links, five checks each is 500 things to look at every month, and the checks you skip are the ones that cost you.

LinkRot.io checks every link you paid for daily, puts a price on what broke and emails you the next step. It does not find links you did not know about and it does not build links: it watches the list you give it. You can check five of your links free, with no signup.

Sources

All figures were read on the linked pages on 9 November 2026.

• Ahrefs: link rot study (updated 2 February 2024)
• Linkody: how to monitor backlinks and save a month's budget in a year

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