Editorial Staff
Broken link building or also known as dead link building is the practice whereby you find a broken link on other websites, re-create the dead content, and approach the site owner to link to you instead of the broken link.
Analogy Behind Broken Link Building
No site owner wanted a broken or dead link in their content since it will just create a bad user experience.
So, they will happily replace with a new one if you suggest with the working one.
Doing this is a win-win situation, for you and the site owner.
Take a look on below:
Benefits for Broken Link’s Site Owner
1. Free Audit For Them
With thousand or articles on the site, typically the site owner has no time to do the site audit.
Checking each of their page to see if all the external links are still valid.
With the broken link building method, you’re actually helping them to spot one.
2. Helping The Site Owner to Find Replacement
Once the site owner find a broken link on their site, they’ll either remove the link permanently or replace it with the new one.
We’ll see the second choice more often since replacing with a new one will maintain the content quality and user experience instead of delete the link permanently.
When they choose to replace with a new one, they’ll need to do a research of a new content that is good enough to replace the old one.
With the broken link building method, you’re once again save their time and cut the process of researching a new article as the source.
Benefits for The Broken Link Builder
So, why are you giving out your time for the other site master for free?
Simple.
When they replace the dead link with your link, you’ll get a backlink from them.
From that, you’ll get the SEO juice and traffic!
How to do Broken Link Building?
1. Find Top Sites Within Your Niche
First, list down as much of authoritative sites that are on top of your niche.
Ensure these sites have a good SEO metrics.
2. Find the Dead Link Opportunity Within Your Niche
Around 80 percent of the site owner did not know how to check the dead link within their site.
It is not manual way, but still there is still homework for you to do.
You can use tool like Ahrefs and do an audit for each sites that you have listed down one by one.
First, click the site explorer tab and enter the domain that you want to do 404 audit.
Then, filter the ‘404 not found’ section to see all the dead links that are available on the site.
From here, you also can filter the referring domain from highest to lowest.
3. Find Out What is The URL Used to Link
To find out what was the URL used to link before the link became 404 not found, you can use WayBack Machine Tools.
From there, you’ll have the idea of what was the content about.
4. Find The Existing Article From Your Site or Create a New One
Now, it is time to get the replacement from your site.
You can either create one if you haven’t have one, or suggest the existing one if the topic is the same.
5. Approach The Site Owner
After that, draft an email to the website that have broken link by informing them the dead link location on their site and suggest the replacement on your site.
Ensure that you’re reaching out to the correct contact.
Keep it short and don’t be too “pushy”.
If they did not replied, send them a follow up email as reminder.
