If you just a bought an existing domain, or if you are working on an existing site’s SEO, it is essential that you try to recover potential “link juice”. This particular site only had new content and barely had any links pointing to it, but the domain was 10 years old, so I decided to do a quick link audit and recover some of the links. Once I discovered the most important pages that I had to recover, I recreated those pages from Dec 20 – Dec 30 and the result was doubling of the average impressions:
What I looked at
- Google Search Console won’t tell you all the links pointing at your non-existing pages, but you can still ask Google to show SOME of the sites linking to your non existing pages. Simple “domain.com” search on Google (with quotation marks) resulted in a listing of URLs that mention the site.
This type of search will usually list URL citation, or naked links (a hyperlink that uses the URL itself as the anchor text).
I took the list of URLS, crawled them with Screaming Frog, extracted all the external links (Bulk Export->Links->External Links), and only grabbed links that contain my domain.
This gave me a nice list of URLS that have CONFIRMED incoming links for SEO. - Bonus tip: If I wanted to, I could have emailed the site owners that only mentioned the site, but didn’t explicitly link to it. I could have asked them to turn their mention into a real hyperlink.
- Next step was to look at server logs. I opened the log file (last 3 months) in Excel and grabbed the list of all the URLs that Googlebot was crawling recently. If Googlebot tried to reach an URL multiple times recently, that usually means that Google thinks that URL has some value. I took all the URLS with multiple Google visits and added them to the list from step 1.
- I took a look at the Link Explorer in Moz and grabbed all the URLS from “Top followed links to this site” section.
- Did the same thing with SEMrush Backlinks Referring Domains.
- Crawled all the URLs from MOZ and SEMRUSH with Screaming Frog and extracted all the URLs with links pointing to the site.
This resulted in a list of URLs with confirmed external incoming links. I compared that list with the active URLs on the site and discovered about 50 URLs that I could recover, but I decided to prioritize 15 of them. For those 15 I actually created pages with the same topic that the previous post was about. I did this between Dec 20, 2022 and Dec 30, 2022.
On Dec 30, 2022 I did a 301 redirect in HTACCESS for the rest of the non prioritized pages. I redirected them to pages with a similar topic.
I submitted the most important optimized pages to Google on Jan. 2 and 3, 2023.
Around Jan. 5 links began to show up in “Top linking sites” inside Google Search Console (all of these domains weren’t showing up before Jan. 5):
The key to all this was creating active pages so that Google could again include them in its link graph. Otherwise these links wouldn’t have that much SEO value if there was no active URL on the receiving side of the link.