Broken Link Building
What Are Broken Links?
A broken link is a link on a website that no longer leads to the content that it’s supposed to be referencing. Instead, you get one of these big, unpleasant 404 graphics:
How to Find Relevant Broken Links
Using Ahrefs as our broken link checker, we can look at every 404 that currently exists on HubSpot. And not only that, a tool like Ahrefs provides information on which pages are currently linking to these broken pages.
If you’re running a marketing website and had a piece on the buyer’s journey, for example, you now have 172 leads to go after broken links.
The fun doesn’t stop there, either. It’s a pretty good bet that those 172 sites care about marketing, right? So you can also check to see if they have any broken links that you could pursue as well.
See why this strategy is so great for scaling?
There’s another conventional method for finding broken links: scraping resource pages. With this method, an SEO uses advanced search terms in Google or another search engine to find resource pages relevant to their niche.
So what does that look like in practice?
Let’s say you’re trying to promote a marketing website. You would type things like this into Google:
- marketing intitle:links
- marketing intitle:resources
- online marketing inurl:links
- online marketing blogs inurl:resources
From there, you pursue the SERP results that look promising, and manually check that all the resources they list have working links.If you come across a broken link, toss it into Ahrefs or a similar tool to see who else might be linking to the broken page.
The Key to Converting Broken Links Into Wins
Finding these links is easy, nowadays. There are plenty of backlink tools that can show you which websites are referring to broken pages. To name a few:
- Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
- Screaming Frog.
- Moz’s Link Explorer.
But now we’ve reached the hard part – asking a webmaster to replace a broken link with one to your own website.
Outreach is difficult, no matter what link building strategy you’re using. However, that’s actually one of the advantages of broken link building.
In theory, helping a webmaster to identify broken links and fix them is something that could help you to establish a working relationship.
Final Tips to Win Broken Links
Broken link building is still a fantastic tool for earning meaningful links.
In fact, it even has significant advantages over link building staples like guest posting. And as long as you use it in the correct manner, you will see results.Don’t assume that simply having a replacement resource will be enough, though.
Webmasters get emails and pitches all the time; for you to stand out in their inbox, you need to communicate quickly, effectively, and give them a reason to work with you.
The best way to do that is to lean into your own personality to make your emails friendly, helpful, and approachable.
The longer you work at it, the more you’ll improve. All forms of link building take some trial and error.
The nice thing about it though is that you can track what emails work the best. Over time, you can change your style to generate even more wins.
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