This is the only link work where the links already exist and are being wasted, so it beats any acquisition campaign on cost. The trap is that migrations usually preserve the top pages and quietly drop the long tail, and redirect chains built over several migrations eventually break or loop without anyone noticing because the pages still load for users.
WHEN TO REACH FOR THIS
Use after a migration, replatform or site prune, when earned links may be pointing at pages that no longer resolve.
broken-link-and-redirect-recovery.md
---
name: broken-link-and-redirect-recovery
description: Use after a migration, replatform or site prune, when earned links may be pointing at pages that no longer resolve.
---
# Broken Link and Redirect Recovery
This is the only link work where the links already exist and are being wasted, so it beats any acquisition campaign on cost. The trap is that migrations usually preserve the top pages and quietly drop the long tail, and redirect chains built over several migrations eventually break or loop without anyone noticing because the pages still load for users.
## What you need first
- the audited linking domain table with destination URLs
- server logs or a crawl of every externally linked URL following redirects
- the old sitemap or a pre migration crawl if one exists
## Method
1. Crawl every externally linked URL and record the full redirect chain and final status, not just the first hop - a 200 at the end of five hops still costs you.
2. Flag anything ending in 404, 410, a soft 404, or a redirect to the homepage. Homepage redirects are the most common and the most damaging, because a mass redirect to root is treated as a soft 404.
3. Map each broken URL to the closest genuine equivalent page. Where no equivalent exists, recreate a thin but real page rather than redirecting to a category, if the link is worth it.
4. Collapse chains to a single hop by rewriting the origin rule, not by adding another rule on the end, which is how chains grow in the first place.
5. Check the reverse direction too: pages on your site linking out to now dead resources, which is both a user problem and the hook for asking those sites to link back when you replace the resource.
6. Add a scheduled recrawl of the externally linked URL list so the next migration surfaces breakages in days rather than at the next audit.
## What this produces
A redirect map fixing every externally linked broken URL to a single hop, plus a monitored list of linked URLs.
## Where this goes wrong
- bulk redirecting removed pages to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and passes nothing
- fixing only the first hop and leaving a chain of five behind it
- ignoring that a redirect to an irrelevant page is functionally the same as a 404 for link value
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From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/broken-link-and-redirect-recovery
Free to download · no account, no email
A redirect map fixing every externally linked broken URL to a single hop, plus a monitored list of linked URLs.