Talking of link-building strategies, broken links remain one of the best scalable tactics to get backlinks from high authority sites.
This tactic works so well and can be a good source of getting high-quality links.
Because
The web is filled with lots of broken links, and many links get broken every day.
Here’s an opportunity for you!
You could augment your link building campaign by turning these broken links into backlinks.
Once you understand the processes I’m going to show you now – and follow it; you’ll see your rankings and traffic increases in no time.
So if you’re looking to turn broken links in your niche into opportunity…
You’re in the right place.
And in this post, I’ll show you exactly how to mine high-quality links just from the broken links you find on the web.
Plus, later on, I’ll give you my link outreach template that I personally use to build backlinks for my site.
What Is Broken Link Building?
Broken link building is a process of finding broken links or dead links and creating a similar content to that of the dead content – then informing the webmasters to link to your content instead of the broken link page.
Almost every site owner – if not all – will be happy to fix broken links on their site.
When you identify a resource linking to a dead page (i.e., a page that no longer exists), what you can do is to recreate that dead content and ask the site owner to link back to that content on your site.
This way, you both benefit; you get a link, and he fixes a broken link – that could potentially send bad user experience signals to search engines.
Plus, for you… a higher ranking on Google.
Broken link building is super-scalable, and you don’t need to spend to get tens or even hundreds of backlinks to your site.
How to find broken links and turn them into an opportunity
There are two methods to doing this:
- The easiest, quickest and most effective method.
- The free method.
Whichever method you choose, there are three steps involved:
- Finding broken links on websites within your niche ( which has lots of backlinks)
- Creating content similar to the ones the broken links point to
- Doing your outreach to the site owners offering them to link to your content
But first, you’ll need to create a list of websites that you want to find broken links on.
And to do that…
Head over to Google and enter the keyword you want to rank for.
Add the URLs of the top results into a spreadsheet ( you can scrape the URLs and then export them to a spreadsheet).
Method #1: the easiest and most effective way
To find broken link building opportunities for your site, use the Website Auditor broken link checker in SEOpowersuite (get free access to SEOpowersuite) here.
Here’s a demonstration…
Step 1: Finding Broken Links On Website within your niche
First, run Website Auditor and start by entering a relevant domain name for one of the websites, create a project for one of your prospects, and let the tool do its things.
Then, go to the Site Structure > Site Audit module.
This will show you all of their broken links.
You’ll see the information on all of the broken links of this website under Links.
Let me demonstrate using one of the websites on my list.
Step 2: Create content similar to the ones the broken links point to
Not every time you’ll have to create new content.
If the content on your site is focused on your primary keywords, there’s a good chance that one of your existing content will fit and relates to the content on the page.
But that’s if you have lots of content covering large topics on your site.
Otherwise, you’ll have to create one specifically to replace the broken link.
Here’s how to find out the content that used to be on the page…
Copy the URL of one of the broken pages in Website Auditor to WayBackMachine and inspect the content that used to be on the page before it was removed.
WayBackMachine is an internet’s archive that shows you how the content on a page looks in the past.
Pro tips: You can also make some good guesses by looking at the anchor text to the pages.
Now that you have ideas about the content on the page go ahead – look for opportunities in your existing content or write a new one. And pitch the site owners.
Step 3: Outreach to the site owners – notifying him of the broken links and ask to link back to your content
Once you’ve figured out the dead links and created the content, now is time to send out emails to the webmasters informing them of their broken links.
To do this, start up Link-Assistant in SEOpowersuite.
This tool handles all of your link building campaigns (check my SEOpowersuite reviews). It’s designed with:
Built-in email browser for your link building outreach campaigns.
But it does much more than that.
It houses all of your link prospects collected using other methods and so on.
First of all, add the prospects domains that you want to reach out to.
You can either do this manually by pressing the Add button and then pasting their domains.
Or you can import the downloaded CSV file from the Website Auditor.
Now, click on Email Menu, and there you’ll see the list of domains together with their emails.
When you hover on your link prospect’s domain, an email icon appears.
Once you click on it, you’ll be taken to an Email menu.
Go ahead and add your work email information, and from there, you can start reaching out to your prospects (below is my broken link building email outreach template) you can easily use – copy paste and customized.
You can follow them up and as well read the replies within the tool.
You can also create or use the existing email templates out of the bath.
Method #2: The Free Way To Find Broken Links Opportunity
For this method, you’re going to install a popular chrome extension tool:
- Check My Links or
- Broken Links Checker
These are free tools that let you find broken links without paying a dime.
Step 1: Find Broken Links On Website within your niche.
For this guide, we’re going to use Check My Links.
Once you’ve installed this tool, go to one of the sites from your list of URLs. Go to their blog post – and check for older posts.
Pro tips: the likelihood of finding broken links on fresh posts is very slim. So look for older posts in the archives.
While on the page, you’ll see all invalid links in red together with the dead links marked with a 404 error.
Step 2: Create content similar to the ones the broken links point to
Take the link and run it through the Wayback Machine to know what content was on the page.
Just like we did in the step above, you can then recreate or create similar content. Or look for existing content and relevant anchor text that would fit the link.
Step 3: Outreach to the site owners – notifying him of the broken links and ask to link back to your content
You can use your Gmail account to send emails to the webmasters. But first, you’ll need to find their email contact using Hunter.io or FindThatLead (they have free credits you can use).
Once you install the Hunter chrome extension plugin, head to the website you want to contact and click on the Hunter plugin icon, it will immediately give you any available email address on the website.
You can also do this by looking manually for contact information on the:
- Contact us page
- About us page or
- The footer of the homepage
This way, if you can’t still see emails to contact, use their Social Media handles to reach out to them.
Let them know that you couldn’t find an email to reach, and that’s why you opt for this method.
Summing “Link Building Strategy” Up…
Broken link building is one of the oldest link building strategies that is still the easiest. Every web admin wants to keep their link profile clean and ensure no links return 404 on their website.
