Ahrefs marks a backlink as lost for eight different reasons, and only one of them means somebody took your link down. The other seven describe the linking page, or the crawl, or the index.
That matters because the reaction to a lost link is usually an email, and seven times out of eight there’s nobody to email.
Here’s what each reason means, which ones fix themselves, and how to tell before you spend the outreach.
The Eight Reasons
Ahrefs groups them by what they describe, and that grouping is the useful part.
| Reason | What it means | About |
|---|---|---|
| Link removed | No link to your URL was found on the page at the last crawl | The link |
| Broken redirect | The link now points through a redirect that ends somewhere invalid | The link |
| Not found | The linking page couldn’t be reached at the last recrawl | The page |
| 301/302 redirect | The linking page now redirects elsewhere | The page |
| Noindex | The linking page went noindex, so its links stop counting | The page |
| Not canonical anymore | The page now names a different URL as canonical | The page |
| Crawl errors | The page returned something other than a 200 at the last recrawl | The page |
| Dropped | The page left Ahrefs’ index on quality grounds | The page |
Read the third column first. Ahrefs splits these two ways, and six of the eight describe the linking page rather than your link.
The One That Means What You Think
It’s “Link removed”, and Ahrefs defines it narrowly: no link to your target URL was found on the referring page during the most recent crawl.
That’s the only status where an outreach email makes sense, and even then the crawl date matters more than the label.
Dropped is not about you
A page can leave the index for being a duplicate, for being blocked in robots.txt, for going offline, for the domain being deleted, or for scoring too low. Your link didn’t change. The page stopped qualifying.
Why a Link You Can Still See Gets Marked Lost
This is the case that wastes the most time, and Ahrefs documents it separately.
- The crawler was blocked. If the site refuses Ahrefs, the link becomes invisible to Ahrefs without changing at all.
- A slightly different URL: www and non-www count as different pages, and so do trailing slashes.
- The site moved to HTTPS. The link survives, the address it was recorded against does not.
- The link is JavaScript. Ahrefs renders popular pages, so a scripted link on a quiet page can go unseen.
None of those is a publisher decision. All of them look identical in a report, which is why the reason column exists.
Which Ones Come Back on Their Own
Some do. Ahrefs states that a link lost to Not found is restored once the page becomes reachable again.
So a temporary outage looks like a loss for exactly as long as the outage lasts.
The redirect and canonical statuses behave similarly: fix the underlying page condition and the link returns to the report on a later crawl.
Judge it against the crawl, not the calendar
Every status above is a description of one crawl. That’s the same lag behind a link you bought that hasn’t appeared yet, which we covered in a backlink that hasn’t appeared.
What to Do Before You Email Anyone
Three steps, in this order, and most lost links stop at the first.
- Open the live page and search it for your URL. If the link is there, the report is describing a crawl and not a removal.
- Read the reason column: six of the eight statuses point at the page’s condition rather than at your link.
- Check the protocol and the slash. A link recorded against one URL form and living on another is the commonest false alarm.
Run that check whenever a lost-backlink alert fires. Our piece on which Ahrefs alerts to switch on explains why that one is the noisiest of the three.
What the Report Can’t Tell You
It can’t tell you whether Google agrees. Ahrefs is describing its own index, and a link absent from one crawler’s view can be perfectly visible to another.
It also can’t tell you when the change happened, only that the most recent crawl saw something different from the one before it. The gap between those two crawls is unstated and can be substantial.
Which is why the reason matters more than the count
A dashboard showing lost links is nearly useless as a number. The same figure can be one removed placement or a dozen pages that were briefly unreachable, and the two call for completely different responses.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does link removed mean in Ahrefs
It means no link to your target URL was found on the referring page during the most recent crawl. It’s the one status of the eight that describes your link rather than the page hosting it.
Why does Ahrefs say a link is lost when I can see it
It happens because the crawler was blocked, the page moved to HTTPS, the URL form changed, or the link is JavaScript on a page Ahrefs doesn’t render. The link is there and Ahrefs couldn’t record it.
What does dropped mean
The linking page left Ahrefs’ index on quality grounds, which can include duplication, a robots.txt block, the page going offline or the domain being deleted. It describes the page, not your link.
Will a lost backlink come back
Some do. A link lost because the page wasn’t reachable is restored once the page is live again. Redirect and canonical changes behave the same way once the underlying condition is fixed.
Should I do outreach about a lost link
Only after opening the live page and confirming the link isn’t there. Seven of the eight statuses can appear while the link is still on the page, so the email is wasted in most cases.
Read the Reason Column First
The next time a lost-links report worries you, sort it by reason before you read the total. Most of what’s in there is describing somebody else’s page, and the handful that describes your link is the only part worth acting on.