How lost backlinks are detected

What 'lost' means in Beacon and why detection is deliberately conservative.

When a site removes its link to you, Beacon marks that backlink as lost. Losing links from high-authority sites can drag rankings down within days, so these are worth acting on — often a friendly email asking for the link back.

Why some losses show up late

Beacon monitors your strongest links (up to the top 100 by authority). To avoid false alarms, it only declares links lost when it can see your complete link picture — otherwise a link merely slipping out of the top 100 would be misreported as gone. If your site has a very large link profile, a genuine loss may take an extra refresh cycle to surface.

Treat the lost-links list as high-confidence: when Beacon says a link is gone, it's because the source page really stopped linking to you — not because of a counting quirk.