Broken Link Building: A Comprehensive Guide For Beginners

In this guide, you will learn-
☛ What is broken link building?
☛ How to make a broken link building strategy?
☛ Why using broken link building should be a part of your link building strategy?
☛ How to find relevant broken links?
☛ How to create the content that is being linked to?
☛ How to find contacts and draft an impactful broken link outreach email?

Of course, you all are very well aware of the amazing Benefits of Link Building. Today, let’s walk you through a basic understanding of broken link building, the process of finding broken links and gaining benefits from those.

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken link building (also known as Dead Link Building) is a practice of finding broken outbound links on different websites which match your niche, reaching out and giving them a replacement link that is redirected to your website.

Broken backlinks happen because of the:

✓ The changed domain of the linked content

✓ Removal of the linked content

✓ Changed page URL of the linked content

How to Make a Broken Link Building Strategy?

Like you create an impactful Link Building Strategies, similarly for Broken link building also you require a full-proof and effective strategy. To make a broken link building process successful, you need to split your process into three stages:

☛ Find broken backlinks. Search the sites that fulfill two criteria: the site consists of a broken link, and the site is one that you would choose to link back to yours.
☛ Develop replacement content. Develop content that meets the linked source. The content has to be natural and suitable replacement for the linked information.
☛ Reach out to the website owner. Find the website owner and convince him to replace the dead link present on their page with yours.

It sounds easy, however, the tough part of the entire process is getting the right opportunities at the right time. There are few techniques suggested by the professional Link Building Specialists that can help you reach to those golden opportunities.

Why Using Broken Link Building Should be a Part of Your Link Building Strategy?

First of all, it is important to clarify that only broken link building should not be the only tactic to use in link building. It should be a strategy that becomes a part of your more extensive strategy and consistently finding the opportunities exist and utilizing them can assist you to get an actual competitive advantage.

You are reaching out as well as gaining backlinks for fresh content you have written, then why you should give preference to broken link building? The reason behind this is that you can:

☛ Build links from within niche-based content, improving the visibility as well as the growth of target pages
☛ Build links on pages that have just acquired authority
☛ Inherit links that formerly indicated to competitors and use that authority to boost your Link Building for SEO
☛ Add other link building strategies as the opportunities arise

How to Find Relevant Broken Links?

The first part of the link building strategy is finding broken links, which aren’t all that hard.

In fact, it’s among some reasons the majority of people tout broken link building for its scalability. There are a plethora of ways to search for broken links.

1. Scraping Resource/Links Pages In Your Niche

This is the method majority of people use to find the broken link building opportunities.

Here is the complete process:

☛ Utilize advanced Google search operators to find resource pages in your niche
☛ Bulk scrape all the search results
☛ Scrape outbound links from every scraped resource page
☛ Check the HTTP status for every page
☛ Use Ahrefs to identify which pages have the most inbound links.

To get resource pages in your niche, you would Google terms such as:

☛ KEYWORD intitle:”resources”
☛ KEYWORD inurl:”links”
☛ KEYWORD intitle:”links” inurl:”/links”
☛ KEYWORD blogs inurl:”resources” intitle:”resources”

Also, if you don’t want to perform any lengthy process, you can always go for SEO provider. But before that you should know Why Do You Need SEO to boost visibility

Here’s an example:

You would then scrape all the Google search results using something such as Scrapebox, or this SERP scraping bookmarklet for chrome. Then you would take out the outbound links from all those pages. You would likely use Screaming Frog or Scrapebox for this. Both of these applications will analyze the HTTP status for each outbound link, so you can conveniently identify 404’s.

If you do not have Screaming Frog, you can get all the external links on a page using Google sheets with this formula:

=IMPORTXML(“page url”,”//a[not(contains(@href, ‘domain’))]/@href”)

2. Use The Wikipedia “Dead Link” Technique

Wikipedia is another place to get many 404 pages. And not just any 404 pages, but dead links that many people are linking to.

Here is how you can do it:

First of all, search in Google with this search string:

site:wikipedia.org “keyword” intext:” dead link”

PRO TIP: Use a broad keyword in the search string (Like instead of “mercedes”, search for “car”). That way, Google will come up with any Wikipedia entry that’s relevant to your keyword.

This will present you pages on Wikipedia that have at least one broken link.

Finally, visit Wikipedia and scroll down to the references section. Any link that you see tagged with a dead link is called broken.

So: what’s next? Here is an example

It’s not suggested to try to replace the link on Wikipedia with a link to your website. Why?

First off, Wikipedia links are no follow links. Second, Wikipedia editors don’t do trouble creating things. Unless your link genuinely deserves to be there, it is going to get removed within hours. Instead, pop that dead link into a backlink analysis tool to get other websites that are also linking to that page.

Most people ask – How to Increase Website Traffic for small business? Well, broken link building is the great and scalable approach to get the right links, build website authority and increase traffic.

3. Find broken outlinks on those same websites

Choose a website to which you want to link to your website. Let’s assume it’s abc.com, now check its broken outgoing links in Ahrefs Site Explorer.

To execute this, go to Outgoing links -> Broken links.

Suppose you find 135 pages on this site that have links to the external pages that are not available now. You can check it out quickly.

✓ How to use that broken link?

If you get a broken link to an article, you can write about that particular topic and suggest it as a fix to that broken link. If you want to squeeze even more from that single broken link you got! Then check the dead URL in tools like Site Explorer. And then you can find many referring domains you can reach out to with your content.

4. Run Backlink Checks On Websites

Using any tool like Ahrefs as your broken link checker, you can look at every 404 error that currently exists. And not only that, a tool like Ahrefs offers information on which pages are currently linking to all the broken pages. If you are operating a marketing site and had a piece on the buyer’s journey, for instance, you currently have 160 leads to go after broken links.

The benefit doesn’t stop there, either. It is a good bet that those 160 sites actually care about marketing right? So you can also go through to see if they have any broken links that you could pursue as well. You can also use popular Free Keyword Research Tools to build links.

If you are trying to promote a marketing website. You would type things mentioned below into Google:

☛ marketing intitle:links
☛ marketing intitle:resources
☛ online marketing inurl:links
☛ online marketing blogs inurl:resources

From there, you can get the SERP results that look interesting, and manually check that all the resources they mentioned have working links. If you come around a broken link, toss it into Ahrefs or a similar tool like that to see who else might be linking to the broken page.

How to Create the Content That is Being Linked To?

As per the company providing the quality Small Business SEO Services, the beginning point for crafting relevant content is to check what the dead page was all about. By finding this, you get an understanding of exactly what and why someone decided to link to the previous content.

You may find that the CSS and images don’t load completely, however, you can witness what the content resembles and how detailed it was.

Basically, you can see exactly what somebody linked out to and speculate at why. You should know this as you now have to do one of two things:

☛ Find a page on your website that already has the topic, for example, “How Many Backlinks Do I Need for my website?” with complete information and would be a suitable replacement link.
☛ Create a content on your website that adds value in a similar way as the dead page does.

It is all about providing with a strong reason for some to replace the broken link and capable of showing that the content on your website is as good as, if not a preferred fit than the original.

When you have got a similar (but better) piece of content on your website, it is time reaching out to those who linked.

How to find contacts and draft an impactful broken link outreach email?

You know, you are just a few steps away to get the answer to your question: how to build backlinks for your website by broken link building?

1. Ways to find contacts

You should already have a list of prospects to connect with. However, what you don’t have is contact details for the website, and you will have to find these.

Typically, you have some key options:

✓ Look at contact pages, author bio pages, or even about us pages. More often, these will list contact details for webmasters, editors or site owners. You might not always get an email address easily; it might be a form. Note these down along with your target prospects.

✓ Use a tool, for example, Hunter.io that can provide you with almost anyone’s email address.

✓ Switch to Google. Utilizing search operators to limit a search can sometimes assist you in finding what you are seeking.

You have to make a list of the links, contact details and the name of the person you are reaching out to.

2. Outreach for Broken Link Building

Outreach is troublesome, no matter what is Link Building strategy you’re utilizing. Notwithstanding, that is really one of the benefits of broken link building.

In theory, assisting a webmaster to find broken links as well as fix them is something that could help you to build a working relationship.

By being useful and true, they may be ready to take care of you and mention your link. If you see, this complete situation will be totally in your favour. So, make sure you put best efforts to get success in this.

Truly? most of the times, the company providing the reliable SEO Services India do this activity to boost the scalability of broken link building. They’ll send out emails that seem like this:

Hello [webmaster],

My name is ___ and I really love the content of your website [insert URL here]. However, I found a broken link today that I thought to inform you about it. I am putting the link in this post [insert page here] and also providing the anchor text in question.

I actually have a same guide which you can use if you required to replace the link. Here’s the link, please have a look: [insert your own link here]

Thank you!

Link Builder

The primary benefit of this email is that you can utilize it as a template and truly accelerate the outreach process.

The SEO professional providing high-quality SEO Reseller Services India suggests that before mailing to the webmaster you’re willing to reach out, make sure the mail looks best and genuine.

The problem, therefore, is that webmasters get requests like this constantly, particularly if you’re striving to reach out to a mainstream blog or site.

If they’ve seen this strategy previously, they know the actual game. They understand that you’re in it for a link and not for their website’s success. Thus, the success rate of such formats falls significantly.

So, what should you do?

✓ Contact the right person: Do the research to get the suitable contact. Find out who manages the website as well as look for their direct contact information.

✓ Develop a rapport: Focus on developing a rapport with the webmaster as opposed to quickly requesting for a link. Indeed, you could utilize the primary email to acquaint yourself and to talk about their site. Developing that relationship as well as learning about the webmaster will provide you with a more beneficial relationship and boost the chances of gaining a link.

✓ Keep things simple: No one loves to read lengthy emails. Not one person. And it’s ok as a link builder to feel as if you need to sell the person you’re giving a link, but actually, you will get beyond that. Suppose that, you should write a subject line like this: “I found a broken link on your site.” Its simple, easy to understand and doesn’t need a lot of back-and-forth. You’ve got a great chance of receiving a reply with this than a subject line that seems creative.

✓ Show appreciation: In return, if you find a webmaster is giving a positive response to you, return the favour. Try to show appreciation towards their efforts and do everything you can to make their time worthy.

✓ Learn more about them: This is particularly useful if you’re reaching out to webmasters who receive a lot of web traffic. Go the extra mile by studying a lot about them prior to your, initially contact them. Check whether they have social media pages or whether you both have common interests. These can be the best conversation starters and find the ball rolling in the right direction.

It’s simple to begin thinking quite clinically with outreach, as though you’re endeavouring to make a transaction. However, that is simply not a winning formula for link building. You have to be amicable and easy-to-work-with, while giving webmasters with a reason to work with you.

This reminds you of when you have to contact bloggers for quality Guest Posting for SEO and you need to appreciate their work and tell them why you are interested in posting your blog in theirs.

Final Takeaway:

Broken link building is still a superb tool for gaining meaningful links. In fact, it even has significant advantages more than link building staples such as guest posting. And the more you use it in the right manner, the more you will see results.

Looking for professional help to build quality links for you? Hire Link Building Corp. We provide our scalable Link Building Services combined with proven strategies to build links that are valued by Google.

To reap the benefits of our services, feel free to contact us. We will be happy to serve the best.

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