You pitched for weeks, the piece went live, the link was perfect — followed, well-anchored, on a DA 60 site. Six months later it's quietly gone. Nobody emailed you. The page still exists; your link doesn't. This happens constantly: industry studies put link decay at 8–12% per year, and for paid or guest placements it can run higher.
Why links disappear
Mostly, nothing personal. Pages get consolidated in content audits. Sites migrate and a redirect chain eats the paragraph your link lived in. An editor prunes "external links" site-wide. A new SEO makes everything nofollow out of caution. Occasionally it is deliberate — a competitor paid for your slot in a listicle — and that's worth knowing quickly too.
Step 1: verify it's really gone
Before emailing anyone, confirm the loss is real. A monitoring tool that fetched the page and found no link is different from one that couldn't fetch the page at all — sites go down, bot protection blocks crawlers, timeouts happen. Treat a single failed check as a maybe; treat a successful page load with no link in the HTML as a definite. (This distinction is exactly why cheap monitors cry wolf so often — insist on a tool that tells you the difference.)
Step 2: diagnose before you email
Load the page yourself. If the whole page 404s, look for where its content moved (site search, Google cache, the sitemap) — your ask becomes "the new version of your page is missing the link the old one had." If the page exists but your link is gone, check whether all external links were stripped (a policy change — harder) or just yours (an oversight — easier). If it went nofollow site-wide, a personal appeal probably won't reverse policy; note it and move on.
Step 3: the recovery email
Short, warm, zero entitlement. Remind them of the collaboration, note the change factually, and make the fix effortless: "When [page] was updated last month, the reference to our [resource] dropped out — here's the exact URL and the sentence it used to live in, if it's useful to restore." Providing the precise anchor and placement roughly doubles recovery rates because you've reduced the editor's job to a paste.
Step 4: know when to rebuild instead
One polite follow-up after a week is fine; beyond that, the maths favours new outreach over chasing. A lost DA 40 link and two unanswered emails is the universe telling you to go earn a fresh one — often from the diagnosis itself: a broken-link pitch to whoever else linked to the dead page you found in step 2.
The real fix is detection speed
Recovery rates fall off a cliff with time. Notice within a week — while the edit is fresh in the editor's mind and the CMS revision is one click away — and restoration is routine. Notice at the quarterly report and it's archaeology. Daily automated re-verification of every built link, with alerts for removals, nofollow flips and anchor changes, turns link maintenance from a quarterly panic into a five-minute Tuesday task. That's the whole game: links aren't built once, they're kept.