Well, it wasn't easy. Harvesting backlinks is hard but harvesting quality backlinks is much harder. Why would people give you links for free? Why would people in your industry do so without asking for a favor in return?

Family first

We always go for new backlinks, new websites, new partnerships and so on, but what about our old backlinks?  Do they still fit our new needs? Probably not. We had a website which had 400 really good quality backlinks from authority sites. It was heaven for SEOs but it seems none of those links really helped. Most of them had a really bad anchor text with the old company name or old tag line, spelling mistakes and a lot of incorrect data. So, we used several backlink tools and created a huge list of all our backlinks creating this Excel table:

 As you can see, each link has its own title, url and all sorts of rank factors (google rank, inlinks, mozrank and so on). We added another very helpful columns: "Indexed in google", "anchor text", and "last cached". We manually checked every backlink and filled the table. It was long but easy. Then, we divided the list into 2 parts: Indexed links and non-indexed. We sorted both lists and ranked them using all the columns mentioned. Now here comes the hard part. We went through these links and contacted their webmaster asking them to make some changes if they will. Yes, we sent about 300 e-mails and waited for answers.  We got some bounced emails, but most of them reach their destination.

Before I'll tell you about the results, I think it's time to talk about all our great quality non-indexed backlinks. 40% of the backlinks were not indexed in Google at all. Most of them were part of great domains, but somehow Google skipped them. It was a complete waste of good links.  We needed to wake them up! But how?

Wakie Wakie!

We had several options and we used them all together:

1. We linked to those "dead" links from other authority sites.
2. We asked the webmasters to link the lost page from one of their top categories page (from sidebars for example).
3. We asked the webmasters to create sitemaps for their websites. (How dare we?!)
   
4. Some other methods.
   

Results

I was really surprised. We got something like 220 replies. Some of them contained the word "OK" and that's it. Some asked questions about our interests, and some wanted to revive some old business connections.The final result after 2 weeks was ~200 fresh, clean, authority Google-indexed backlinks. Free of charge.

Now we can go on and try harvesting some new backlinks.