Every day, internet users spend hours trying to navigate through dead links—often hitting a dead end—and end up disappointed.
Imagine what they could achieve if every link they clicked on the web took them to the expected destination—learning, earning, purchasing, or creating.
Broken links on the web make readers cranky. When you have them, the content you publish is both ineffective and a burden.
But did you know you can use them to your advantage? That’s right. Broken links are a low-hanging fruit for link building for SEO.
Simply put: if you spot a broken link in a relevant authoritative site that your website could benefit from, you only need to reach out (to the webmaster) and offer to help them fix it and get a link in return.
But how do you do it? That’s what this article is all about. The good thing about this method is that it is ridiculously simple. All you need to do is copy the process or simply hire a broken link building service.
Let's do this.
What Are Broken Links For Link Building?
A broken link meaning is a hyperlink of a web page or resource that can't be found or accessed by a user—whenever they click on a link on the internet.
It basically points to a page that does not exist. And this can be pretty frustrating to the website owner and internet user alike.
For instance, visitors get frustrated when they fail to complete their journey, which can lead to a loss of traffic, rankings, and revenue for the website owner.
More often than not, it happens because of the following broken link example issues:
- The destination website is no longer available.
- An incorrect URL entered for the link by the website owner.
- The destination website removed the linked web page (causing what is known as a 404 error).
- The destination website moved the linked web page to a new URL without redirecting the old URL to the new one (causing a 404 error).
…and as you may know, this has gravy consequences for SEO. That’s because neither will Google’s crawlers nor internet users understand the other page.
Now, broken link building is an SEO strategy that involves identifying those dead links on external websites and offering your own relevant content to replace the pages that have moved or been deleted.
The big idea here is to find a dead page and ask linkers to swap the links to a working page on your site. This is done as webmasters and website owners don’t want to send visitors to a dead resource.
At the end of the day, you should be able to get a link to your site that can help you get a new audience (traffic)—that could have been lost, increase Domain Authority, and higher rankings if the link is deemed relevant by Google.
Wait a minute…it’s not as easy as you may think. You have to find those dead links, ensure you have a superior replacement page, and then start reaching out to the webmasters to discuss the exchange.
The best thing though about this broken link building strategy is that you’re offering something of value in exchange and if you can leverage the panic (by the webmaster), you can get more out of it.
Let’s tackle the process of finding those dead links.
How Do You Find A Link Is Broken?
This is the first and perhaps most important part of this link building strategy—without an actual broken link on your list, you can’t move anything.
But how do you actually get them, can you find broken links with your naked eyes?
There are two approaches to that:
- Use SEO tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog
- Manually search for broken links
Here are the tactics:
- Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
- Look for broken pages about a topic
- Look for broken links on resource pages
Let’s look at them one by one.
#1. Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
If your competitors' pages have broken links in some of the competing keywords for which they’re ranking, then you can use that to your advantage.
In this case, you use the tools mentioned above to check through these pages and discover pages that were once valuable resources but are now broken.
Next, you can reach out to the websites linking to these pages and suggest your relevant, working content as an alternative.
#2. Look for broken pages about a topic
If you want to scale your broken link building efforts, you can also search for broken pages specifically related to a particular topic or niche.
You can use proven tools like Ahrefs tools to find pages that once contained valuable information but are now broken.
Once identified, you can create similar, up-to-date content on the same topic and reach out to the websites that link to the broken pages, suggesting they link to your content as a replacement.
#3. Look for broken links on resource pages
Resource pages are often rich sources of valuable links. Why?
- People rarely update them, so they often link to dead resources.
- They list helpful resources, which often have links from many other sites.
A broken link in this kind of resource puts the integrity of the site on a test of scale. So, in most cases, they will be willing to protect it but by doing so, you also get a chance to walk away with a nice and powerful backlink.
Here is how to manually find them in the SERPs by trying the following searches:
- marketing intitle:links
- marketing intitle:resources
- online marketing inurl:links
- online marketing blogs inurl:resources
After this, you can use any backlink-checking tool to find out how links are distributed and which are broken and worth pursuing.
The Ultimate Guide to Broken Link Building
So you have a list of broken links that you want to chase? Sweet!
There are a few steps you can follow to earn those links. Let’s take a look at them.
#1. Start by vetting the link prospects
Link quality is probably the most important factor here. You might have thousands of broken links in prospects, but not all are worth your time and efforts.
This is because Google already made it clear that they prefer high quality backlinks rather than quantity.
So in this stage, your work is to analyze all of them and ensure you chase the ones that would bring value to your site.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Does the broken page have any good backlinks profile?
- Can you align your page with what people linked?
- Will it be beneficial to my audience?
This will help you to figure out whether what you’re just about to pursue is worth it.
Fast forward, these four filters are a helpful place to start:
- “Dofollow” links only. This excludes most low-value links such as those from directories, forums, and blog comments.
- Exclude subdomains (which are often low-quality and spammy.
- DR 5+. This excludes links from very low-authority websites.
- Domain traffic: 20+. This excludes links from websites with little to no traffic.
It is also important to evaluate your prospects based on the reasons for linking. For example, there are generally two reasons:
- General links where you can’t see why they linked to that specific resource from the link’s context.
- Deep links where you can see what that reason is from the link’s context.
Next…
#2. Create a superior replacement page
At the start of this article, we said this strategy tends to work because you are basically trying to help the other party with something of value—and the link is just the icing on the cake.
Even so, it’s important to know that nobody is just going to offer you a link if your replacement page doesn’t make it to the cut.
You have to create content that is not only helpful but also relevant and updated—on the topic.
Additionally, you have to get your pitching right—probably through link building email outreach (more on this later).
The ideal replacement page should be able to fulfill the same purpose and talk about similar things as those in the broken link.
But most importantly, it should meet Google’s Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (EEAT) criteria.
Lastly…
#3. Do outreach and follow-up
The last but also important stage in broken link building is doing the outreach.
This is the do-or-die stage—where you have to ensure you can convince the webmaster (s) to listen and accept your offer.
And in this case, the better you understand the outreach tactics, the more likely you are to have success.
The basic procedure is as follows:
- Find the contact information for the site you’re contacting first.
- Then, send them an email informing them of the broken link on their website (and suggest your link as a replacement).
When doing outreach, ensure that your copy follows these rules :
- Always address the recipient by name
- Pinpoint precisely the broken link URL
- Suggest a relevant substitute and explain why it’s appropriate
- Keep it short and don’t be too salesy
Here is a sample that you can customize (depending on the case at hand).
Subject Line: Broken link on {{Domain}}
Hey {{firstname}},
I was doing some research on (Topic) in {{Domain}} page, but sadly… I came across a broken link and had to watch some cat videos to calm me down…
Here you can find it:
– URL: {{Page URL – Broken link}}
– Anchor: {{Anchor – Broken link}}
– Dead URL: {{Dead URL}}
I know how boring and lengthy it can be to find a link to replace it…but I feel like one of my posts on {{name+URL}} would be an awesome addition to your page and a great substitution for the broken link.
What do you think about adding it to your page?
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!
Best regards,
{{Your Name}}
Finally, it’s normal that you might not get a response at the first attempt—it’s always a good idea to “gently” follow up.
Final Thoughts
Broken links are both a burden and a risk to SEO campaigns. They prevent internet users and crawlers from accessing the other pages, as a result creating a wrong impression to customers and search engines.
When you find a broken link, as a broken link builder you can use it to build backlinks for your site and generate tons of SEO benefits by offering a replacement link to the website owner or blogger.
As a general rule of thumb, always ensure that your replacement link recommendation is indeed a good substitute for the broken link. If you do this, you skyrocket your chances of success.
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