Broken Link Building Strategies

Neil Patel
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Author: Neil Patel | Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest
Published September 5, 2024
A graphic that says "Broken Link Building Strategies."

Do you realize you might have potential traffic your site is missing out on? It’s all about your links. In some cases, there may be other sites that are linking back to your pages, but the links are broken. 

You took all the trouble to get noticed but none of the benefits. With that said, you don’t need to let this lie.

Broken links on other sites can be an opportunity to boost your link-building strategy through a technique called broken link building.

How does it work? I’ve identified several tactics for getting backlinks from broken links on other sites to instead link to your website.

Key Takeaways

  • Broken link building improves SEO performance by increasing the number of backlinks to your website, which can bring in more traffic and increase your domain authority.
  • There are several tools to find broken links including Ubersuggest, Semrush, Ahrefs, and Screaming Frog.
  • You can address broken outbound links on your own site and broken inbound links to your content.
  • Other tactics include finding dead links and suggesting or creating content to link to instead, identifying expired domains in your niche, asking webmasters to link to your site or content, and using topics in dead resources to pitch articles to high-authority websites.

Table of Contents

Essentially, broken link building involves creating backlinks by replacing links to 404 pages with another link—to content on your website, for example. 

It’s a great SEO technique because you can use it to add to your list of quality backlinks, which can help your site rank higher on search engines. 

It works two ways. By identifying broken inbound links on your site, you can offer webmasters who linked to that page or resource other content on your site as a suitable replacement—restoring broken backlinks that can maintain or increase your site’s domain authority.

These methods can also lead to additional backlinks from other sites, since the original content was considered valuable enough to link to in the first place.

In short, broken link building is a useful strategy for increasing your backlinks, getting high-authority backlinks, and building your site authority—all of which can support your SEO performance.

“But how do I find broken links on my site?” I can hear you asking.

There are several tools you can use for this.

Ubersuggest’s Site Audit feature checks every link on your site. If a link shows a 404 error, it’ll show up in the report.

Ubersuggest's Site Audit feature.

Ahrefs has a broken link checker feature. Just enter your website URL and it’ll give you broken outbound links on your site as well as broken inbound links. 

Results from Ahrefs' Broken Link Checker.

Scroll down to see the referring page, the anchor text, and the link.

More details from the Ahrefs broken link Checker.

Alternatively, you can use the Site Explorer feature. Enter the URL of a site, then go to the “Best by links” report. You can filter for pages with “404 not found” and even sort the domains by authority. 

Finding broken links through Site Explorer.

The process in Semrush is a little different. Enter your site into the Backlink Analytics tool and navigate to the competitors tab.

Neil Patel's backlinks in Semrush.

Click on a domain and navigate to the “Indexed Pages” tab, then choose the Broken Pages filter. It’ll show you a list of links with error codes.

Broken backlinks to Backlinko from Neil Patel.com.

You can see a detailed breakdown of all the pages on the website that link to that broken URL by clicking the number in the “Backlinks” column. 

More details on broken backlinks/

You can also use these tools to find broken backlinks on other sites, which you can use to build backlinks to your site. We’ll get into that in more detail later on. 

Now you’ve got a list of pages with broken links. Where do you go from here?

Especially if you have a long list, you want to make sure you go about broken link building in the most efficient way possible.  

Use these practices as guidelines for your link building projects. You may decide to focus on a couple or use them all, depending on the resources and time you have for this task.

To make the most of your time and effort, you’ll want to identify which broken links are most valuable for link building by assessing whether the page offers good value as a link to your content.

First, check the quality of the live links on the domain where the broken link is. You can enter the URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and filter the Backlinks report for factors associated with high value. These could include looking for dofollow links only and excluding links from websites with low authority or little traffic.

The Backlinks report in Ahrefs.

You should also investigate the context to understand why the website linked to the broken link in the first place. The resource might have been recommended for its value as a whole, or it might have included a significant statistic or unique insight.

If you know you have content that offers similar value, you could use it for your broken link building efforts, making that broken link a potential prospect.

Since Wikipedia has a plethora of information on different subjects, there are lots of broken links or info that need a citation/reference. That creates an opportunity to get tons of targeted traffic. You also get second-tier natural inbound links from web pages that link to the Wikipedia page where you get listed.

When a Wikipedia editor stumbles upon a dead link, they leave a footnote next to it.

An example of a dead link in Wikipedia.

There are 3 ways to find these dead link opportunities.

  1. Directly search for them under Wikipedia’s article that lists dead external links.
Wikipedia's article of dead external links.
  1. Use a simple string on search engines like:

site:wikipedia.org [your niche keyword] + “dead link”

A query used to find dead links in Wikipedia.

After that, visit a relevant page from the SERP results and scroll down to the link references section at the bottom. 

Use Ctrl + F to search for the label ‘dead link’ and spot the broken external links.

Finding broken external links on Wikipedia.
  1. The last link acquisition technique is a tool like WikiGrabber to find pages that need a citation or replacements for dead links.  
The Wikigrabber homepage.

The tool will return with a bunch of pages that need citations. And, if you scroll down, you’ll also find pages with dead external links.

WikiGrabber results.

Next, plug the broken link into the Wayback Machine to extract the originally published content.

The Wayback Machine.

If you have content that could serve as a good replacement, you can then edit the Wikipedia article to include a link to your content. Otherwise, you’ll have to create new content that addresses the topic, ensuring your content is high-quality to increase your chances of earning link building opportunities.

However, it can be difficult to get Wikipedia edits approved or add links to new content without an established history of credible edits on the site. So, this tactic is most appropriate for people who already have that.

If you’re getting started from scratch here, I would recommend that you first perform 4-5 clean-ups on other relevant articles in your niche and try some link building techniques toward other websites. This ensures that your Wikipedia profile history has some added value and you don’t come across as a marketer. 

If your changes get approved, you’ve earned yourself a nofollow link.

I recommend that you take this campaign further by extracting the email addresses of webmasters of the other referring domains to the broken link. Reach out to them for a link for reciprocal link acquisition.

A list of extracted emails.

You can extract even more link juice once you find broken links on an authoritative website in your niche.

You just need to plug the URL into Screaming Frog or another tool that lets you find the broken incoming links to your competitor’s websites.

Once you get the results, you can sort them by their status code.

ScreamingFrog results.

Source: Screaming Frog

Plug the URLs with 404 pages into Ahrefs and explore other websites linking to those pages.

Results on Ahrefs for links.

You can also rearrange the domains on the basis of their domain rating and see if they are a good fit for you.

There’s one risk-free broken link building strategy that you can employ to ensure that the recipient doesn’t feel used, and that their audience is getting value:

Provide reciprocal link building to authoritative website pages that are linking to your website.

For example, suppose you find a dead resource on a subject of your interest. You can pitch that topic for guest posts on established blogs like Entrepreneur, Forbes, HuffPost, and the like. 

Once you get published on one of those high authority websites, you can request webmasters that are linking to the former dead source link to your guest post instead.

Scoring a link building replacement to a Forbes article is easier than convincing webmasters to link to your own website. This appears less salesy and webmasters feel more secure in linking to high-authority domains. Also, such high-quality links will pass some link juice to your website and help you rank.

Using Expired Domains to Find Opportunities

Normal broken link building (BLB) involves searching for websites that have broken links, creating better content marketing efforts, and performing outreach for links.

But what if you engaged a slightly different link building strategy? Like this:

Find expired domains in your niche >> Request a link from webmasters linking to these dead websites.

Let me show you the 3 simple steps that you need to follow.

Step #1 – Search for a popular industry keyword using a tool like Expireddomains.net to find expired domains in your niche. Here are the results for “VPN”.

Results from ExpiredDomains.net.

Next, sort these results based on the number of referring domains.

Results from ExpiredDomains.com.

You can also hunt for domains on these types of search engines with your keyword + top-level domain (if you’re targeting a specific region). Example: VPN.fr for websites on VPN in French.

Results pages for VPN.fr in Expireddomains.net

In addition, you can search for expired authoritative domains on auction search engines like GoDaddy and Flippa. On these sites, domains are well-organized by their value so it’s easier to find websites with high-quality link building opportunities.

The Godaddy Interface.

Step #2 – Copy the domains that you found along with the link volume data in a Google Sheet.

A Google Sheet with expired domains.

Step #3 – Check the link profile of these collected domains and ditch the websites with spammy links. For example, a website with impressive backlink stats but a low global rank might raise suspicion.

Once you find an expired website with a good link profile, you can find its most linked pages using Ahrefs. Then reach out to the webmasters of those linking sites to ask if they will link to your content or your homepage from their site.

If you want to survive in the competitive business landscape, then you need to network and build relationships with fellow entrepreneurs and marketers.

Discovering dead links on an established blogger’s website and telling them about it is a value addition to their audience. It’s a way to start your relationship on a good note. 

You can write a simple email alerting them that the link is broken and that you want to let them know so they can improve the user experience on their site.

If you have existing content that would serve a similar purpose, you can even suggest linking to that content as a replacement. 

Once you get a response from the website owner, even if you don’t get a backlink, you can convert the opportunity into a long-term partnership. You might, for example, ask if they accept guest posting on their website.

Note that I get tons of such broken link notification emails, but correcting these broken links isn’t the best use of my time. So, for achieving better outreach conversions, consider reaching out to bloggers that have a similar level of influence as you.

You can read more about relationship-based link building here.

Create Replacement Content

As I outlined above, you may have content that could make a good replacement for broken links. If you don’t already have such content, you may want to create it.

However, since this requires a fair amount of resources, you want to make sure it’s worth the effort.

First, look up the original content at the broken link using the Wayback Machine to understand why it attracted links. 

Then analyze the content that includes the broken link to figure out why the site linked to it in the first place. 

Here’s the thing, though. The original content still needs to align with your capabilities and your expertise you can create new content that offers the same or more value. It also needs to still be relevant to what users are searching for today. If no one is looking for that info, it’s not really worth your time. You might include updated statistics, emerging trends, or other recent information that readers will find useful.

Finally, reach out to webmasters at the sites with the broken links and send each one a personalized message highlighting the value of your content as a useful replacement.

FAQs

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken links on other websites, particularly high-authority ones, and suggesting your content as a replacement to gain more backlinks to your website..

What are the benefits of broken link building?

Broken link building boosts SEO by fixing broken links, improving user experience (UX), increasing domain authority, and fostering relationships with influencers and bloggers, all while providing valuable content to users.

How do you do broken link building?

There are several techniques for broken link building. These include finding articles with dead links or in need of citations on Wikipedia to link to your site, using secondary links, and creating content that can replace dead links on external websites.

Conclusion

In almost any niche, there are tons of websites with many broken links, offering a terrific link building opportunity.

You can get creative and extract much more value from broken links. The link building strategies I showed you in this article should inspire you to incorporate the relevant ones in your overall search engine optimization strategy.

While this can take some effort, it can pay off in the end with higher domain authority, more traffic to your site, and increased site visibility.

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Neil Patel

About the author:

Co Founder of NP Digital & Owner of Ubersuggest

He is the co-founder of NP Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.

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source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/dont-let-it-rot-5-strategies-to-leverage-broken-links/