Broken Link Building Strategy That Works

Broken Link Building Strategy That Works

Broken link building is scalable, reliable, and should be part of your link building strategy.

Here’s what you need to know to be successful at it.

A modern, comprehensive link building strategy requires a variety of different tactics to achieve your goals.

When used appropriately, broken link building still rocks.

It’s scalable, reliable, and should be a dependable approach when you need to put together a link building strategy.

Here’s what you need to know to successfully build broken links today.

What Are Broken Links?
A broken link is a link on a website that no longer leads to the content that it’s supposed to be referencing. Instead, you get one of these big, unpleasant 404 graphics:

Image - https://cdn.searchenginejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/page-not-found-404-768x318.png

The big issue with this is that broken links hinder the user experience for anyone browsing your website.

In fact, too many broken links can even hinder the linking site’s SEO.

ask Yourself this question:
Why is this site better off by including the link that I’m asking for?

By pointing out a broken link to a webmaster, and offering a convenient replacement, you’re providing value. You’re helping the webmaster improve their site quality and making their lives easier.

How to Find Relevant Broken Links
Luckily, the process of finding broken links isn’t all that hard.

The most straightforward method would be to start by running backlink checks on websites and competitors in your niche.
Let’s look at HubSpot.com as an example.
HubSpot is an awesome resource for marketing information – but more importantly, they’re also a popular website that will give you an idea of how broken links can be found.

Using Ahrefs as our broken link checker, we can look at every 404 that currently exists on HubSpot.

And not only that, a tool like Ahrefs provides information on which pages are currently linking to these broken pages.

if you’re running a marketing website and had a piece on the buyer’s journey, for example, you now have 172 leads to go after broken links.

The fun doesn’t stop there, either. It’s a pretty good bet that those 172 sites care about marketing, right?

So you can also check to see if they have any broken links that you could pursue as well.

See why this strategy is so great for scaling?

There’s another conventional method for finding broken links: scraping resource pages.

With this method, an SEO uses advanced search terms in Google or another search engine to find resource pages relevant to their niche.

So what does that look like in practice?

Let’s say you’re trying to promote a marketing website. You would type things like this into Google:
marketing intitle:links
marketing intitle:resources
online marketing inurl:links
online marketing blogs inurl:resources

From there, you pursue the SERP results that look promising, and manually check that all the resources they list have working links.