Broken link building is a scalable white hat link building strategy that earns links by finding broken links pointing to a non-existing page known as 404 Pages and asking the webmaster to replace the broken links with your own content.
Actually, broken link building tactic has been around for many years and is still an effective way of building links for free. When you show the broken link(s) to a webmaster and provide a relevant a replacement, he or she will be most likely to accept and thank you for that.
Two keys to broken link building
In order to be successful in broken link building, you must you have to master two things.
- Finding broken links on niche related web pages. It is better if you can scale it up. The more outreach emails you send, the more opportunities you have to broken link building strategy.
- Presenting relevant content to webmaster as the replacement of the broken link content. It is better if you write a fresh content based on the broken content.
Broken link building – basic process
What kind of pages are more likely to find 404 links? Resource pages and long-form guides are perfect because these pages have more links. Fresh content is less likely to have broken links, so you should narrow your search to older content.
Step 1. Install Scraper and Check My Links on your Chrome web browser. Both are free.
Step 2. Search keywords in your niche. You can use search strings like “keyword” + “ultimate guide”. Below are a few more search strings you can use.
Step 3. Click Search Tools and select Any Time>Custom Range. Adjust the Custom date range to a few years ago. You can also change Google search settings to display 100 results per page.
Step 4. Right-click on one of the search results and select “Scrape Similar”. The Scraper extension will list all the results links, and then you can select Export to Google Doc.
Step 5. Open every page in the list and run Check My Links to see if there is a broken link.
Check My Links Extension will highlight the broken links in red. Select the relevant one to ask for a link replacement.
Broken link building email outreach template
After finding the broken links, you can contact the webmaster for link replacement. When you present the broken links and the replacement content, the webmasters will likely to use your link and you build a good relationship with others.
You can use this subject: something wrong with domain.com. When the webmaster sees this subject, he or she definitely will open it.
You can refer to the following template to write the outreach email:
Custom email outreach template
Hi NAME,
I was looking for some information about TOPIC today when I came across your article PAGE TITLE.
Great stuff indeed!
However, I couldn’t help but notice that there are a few broken links listed below.
URL 1
URL 2
Also, I just published something similar that covers this TOPIC:
URL
Feel free to use it to replace the broken link on your site.
Either way, keep up with the great work.
Cheers,
YOUR NAME
If you find multiple broken links on different sites, to make this process more efficient, you can send a simple email without including the broken links to all the webmasters. When they reply, you can send a more custom email.
General outreach email template
Hi NAME,
I was reading an article on your site, a really nice read. However, I did come across a few dead links.
Let me know if you want me to forward the short list so that you can easily fix it.
Either way, keep up with the great work.
Cheers,
YOUR NAME
How to scale up
This process may seem too much work to check each page for dead links one by one. Luckily, you can use tools to scale it up.
Use Screaming Frog for broken link building
After you export the search results to Google spreadsheet, you can use Screamingfrog to crawl these pages in search of broken links.
Step 1. Download and install Screaming Frog. Copy all links from the spreadsheet.
Step 2. Within Screaming frog, click on the Mode tab and select List instead of Spider.
Step 3. Click Configuration >Spider > Limits and adjust the Limit Crawl Depth to 1. Otherwise, it will not crawl the external links.
Step 4. Click Upload and select Paste.
Step 5. After the program crawling all pages, click Bulk Export from the top menu and select External Links.
Now you can sort the exported excel for 404 external links. This method allows you to find broken external links fast. Screamingfrog has a more detailed guide about this. If you desperately need to building links from a target site, you can use Screaming Frog spider to crawl the entire site to find broken links.
You need a Pro version of Screaming Frog to crawl all of the results. Even if you untick crawling of images, CSS, JS etc, it will still go beyond 500 URLs. If you do not have a paid version of Screaming Frog, you can use a free alternative Xenu.
Use free tool Xenu
Free open source tool Xenu Link Sleuth checks all external links and sort all results in a perfect form. Right now, it has a flaw, which is not working with relative path links. Luckily, only a small portion of websites are using the relative path.
Step 1. Use Scraper to export all search results as spreadsheet and then copy all links to a text file.
Step 2. Download and Install an open source tool Xenu Link Sleuth.
Step 3: Open Xenu. Click on Options>>Preferences.
Step 4. Set “Maximum Depth” to 1. Otherwise, it will take much longer time.
Step 5. Under “Report”, uncheck everything except “Report broken links, ordered by page”.
Step 6. Click the tab File from the top menu and select Check URL List.
Step 7. Click OK to let Xenu check all the broken links.
This may take a while. When it finishes, you sort it out by status to display all broken links at the top. the
Make full use of each broken link you find
When you find a dead link, as you know, there may be more pages linking to this link. You can find all pages that point to this broken link and ask for a replacement.
You can use Moz Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs to find all pages that point to a single page.
Just paste the broken link you found to the search box and press Enter. The tool will display all the pages. If you only want to work for dofollow links, then you select the Link type as Only Follow.
Conclusion
Compared to other link building strategies, Broken link building is white hat, free and yet effective.
“Broken Link Building is my all-time favorite link building strategy” from Brian Dean
During the process, you can make friends with other webmasters and SEOs.
“If you’re not making friends, you’re doing it wrong.” From Andy Crestodina
What do you think of this broken link building strategy? Do you have any other link building hacks that are more effective?
