In the "Lost backlinks" report in Site Explorer, you will see a variety of tags that describe "link lost" reasons.
You can use the Status filter to filter for lost links of specific reasons:
Generally, there are two groups of "link lost" reasons.
Those related to the linking page:
Not found — The linking page could not be accessed on our last re‐crawl.
301/302 redirect — the linking page now redirects to somewhere else in the most recent crawl.
Noindex — The linking page has become “noindex” and we don’t count links from such pages.
Not canonical anymore - The linking page specified another URL as its canonical version during the most recent crawl.
Crawl errors - During the most recent recrawl, the linking page returned a HTTP status code that is not 200 (OK).
Dropped - these pages are removed from our index due to various reasons related to link quality.
And those related to the link itself:
Link removed — the linking page is live, but no longer links to your target.
Broken redirect — The link now redirects to an invalid or broken page.
Want to know more about each reason? We dive into deeper detail below.
All link lost reasons in detail:
1. Not Found
The linking page could not be accessed on our last re‐crawl, so we consider a link from it “lost” (but we will add it back if on the next re‐crawl that page will be live).
You can use Page inspect to check the linking page and see when the page was originally found to be live, and what information the page had:
You can alternatively use Archive.org to find out what the page was originally. Then, reach out to the owner to add the page back if you suspect the linking page got deleted accidentally.
Some tell-tale signs of a accidental deletion:
The page has a lot of inbound links pointing to it. Check the number of referring domains.
The page is still being internally linked‐to. Analyse it in Site Explorer and check the Internal links report.
2. 301/302 redirect
The linking page is now redirected somewhere else. And in the case where the final page has a link to your target, this new link will soon appear in your backlink profile.
Much like canonicals, these are often nothing to worry about. Reasons include:
Redirect from HTTP (to HTTPs);
Redirect to standardized version of the URL (e.g., with/without trailing slash);
Redirect to new location of page (e.g., blog.ahrefs.com/x to ahrefs.com/blog/x)
In each of these instances, the redirected URL will usually still link back to your site. So it’s not really lost.
However sometimes the final page does not link back to you. We recommend pursuing these links if:
It is an unlinked mention. They mentioned your name but neglected to link back to you.
There is a link opportunity. If a resource of yours can add value, you can reach out to the site owner and suggest it.
3. Noindex
The linking page has a “noindex” attribute or HTTP response header during the most recent crawl. Ahrefs does not count links from noindexed pages as backlinks.
(this is debatable in the SEO space, but that is what we have decided to do for the time being).
If this does not look right, check if the page was "noindexed" accidentally: Look out for signs of SEO being done on the page. If the page shows any signs of optimization (e.g., targeting a high‐volume keyword, keyword present in meta tags, etc), the likeliness of an accidental “noindex” is high.
If you spot either of these, reach out and give them a heads up.
4. Not Canonical Anymore
The linking page specified another URL as its canonical version during the most recent crawl. Ahrefs does not count links from non-canonical pages as backlinks
(This is again a debatable choice, but we are doing this for now).
You can check the canonical page to see if it still links to your target. If it does, it should show up in Backlink report as a separate backlink. If not, you can contact the target's webmaster and inquire further.
5. Crawl errors
During the recrawl, the linking page returned an HTTP status code different from 200 (OK) to our crawler. So we considered it as a lost link.
If we find the referring page live on the next scheduled recrawl, the link will reappear in the target's Backlinks report.
6. Dropped
These are links from pages that were removed from our index due to various reasons related to link quality. They include:
Page duplicates: We crawled a "better" page with the same content;
Disallowed: The page was disallowed by robots.txt for at least 2 months;
Unavailable: The page returned an error 3 times, and the last successful download was at least 1 month old;
The domain does not exist anymore;
The page has a low URL rating.
As such, even though the link itself may still exist on the page, we indicate it as Lost: dropped when we no longer index the page itself.
In general, we drop these links because they aren't valuable and don't count much towards strengthening the backlink profile of the page. Chances are, you don't have to claim back these links.
7. Link removed
No link to the target URL was found on the referring page during the most recent crawl. The link could have been manually removed.
There could be a few possible reasons:
They refreshed their content. Sites update their articles all the time. Sometimes, they may remove some external links if the new page content does not require it.
They replaced your link with something better. If someone happens to create a better version of your page, their page might be linked to instead of yours.
You can use Page inspect to check the differences made to the page between two dates where we've crawled it:
8. Broken redirect
The redirecting URL couldn't be followed to its destination page during the most recent crawl. This could happen because of a broken redirect, or because the server didn't specify a valid destination URL.
This happens if:
The redirect chain is broken. If any of the pages in the redirect chain fails to respond, it gets reported as a Lost link.
The redirect no longer exists (or is changed). Let’s say you had a link from Site A → Site B but the link was first redirected through one or more other URLs (e.g., Site A → Site C→ Site B). If the linking site was to swap this link out so it linked directly (rather than going through a redirect chain) it would be reported as a Lost link. Same goes if the final URL of the redirect is changed to redirect elsewhere.
NOTE: These lost links may sometimes be also due to temporary issues with the redirects or pages.
To check the URLs in a redirect chain, you can follow this guide and use the Ahrefs SEO toolbar, open the linking page in the browser and check the HTTP redirects to see where the broken page ends up on.
You can either fix the redirect so it goes to an appropriate HTTP 200 page, or contact the site owner and inform them of a working URL to link instead.
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FAQ
Why does Ahrefs report a backlink as “Lost” if I still see it on a page?
This is due to a variety of reasons that we've covered in this article.
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If you have any doubts, please contact support!