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Why does Ahrefs report a backlink as “Lost” if I still see it on a page?
Why does Ahrefs report a backlink as “Lost” if I still see it on a page?

Find out why a link is "lost" even though it's still on the page.

Si Quan Ong avatar
Written by Si Quan Ong
Updated over a week ago

Sometimes, you may see that a link is reported as "Lost" even though you still see it on a page. 

There are plenty of possible reasons for that:

  • Our crawler was blocked by the website;

  • The site was experiencing issues and therefore returned an error when our crawler was crawling;

  • The page was moved to HTTPS;

  • The page became not canonical;

  • The page now redirects to a slightly different URL. Please note that URLs with www and non-www are considered different pages. Likewise goes for URLs with and without a "/" at the end;

  • It was a JavaScript link and the page is not popular enough to be rendered;

  • The link changed to a slightly different page target (for e.g. from non-www to www). 

Most of these cases are explained by the red labels you see in the "Lost" backlinks report. For the exact explanation, please refer to this article on link lost reasons

If you're in doubt or think that we can better explain it on our interface, please contact our support! 

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