From there, I use a chrome extension (LinkMiner) to identify broken links Building on a page. I’ll look for resource banks where my piece of content might be a good fit, while hitting the link miner extension until… BAM…broken link. The benefit of LinkMiner (over other broken link extensions) is the ability to sync to your Majestic or Ahrefs account get a better feel for how big of a broken link jackpot each link contains.
Pro tip: If you uncover a site that has more than 30% broken links, pass on the opportunity. That page is most likely not maintained anymore, and not worth the effort of reaching out. You can bookmark these broken links for additional opportunities and really go down the rabbit hole later.
Another way to find broken pages is using the new link explorer tool from Moz. It’s helpful if you’re targeting the broken backlinks of a competitor or a site that has a broad spectrum of content that you may already have a piece of content to match.
Put your competitor’s URL into Moz’s Link Explorer and click on the top pages in the results. Select “4xx- Broken” in the dropdown and behold, broken pages.
List the pages from most-to-least referring domains and start looking for relevant pages to your own content. If you find a relevant piece of content, put that URL into multiple backlink databases because each site might have picked up backlinks that others have not.
Are you building links for your own organization? Throw your URL into Link Explorer to discover any unknown broken pages on your own website. If you find any, reach out to the webmasters of these pages or redirect that page to a relevant one on your site. Google does not pass link authority to 404 pages so tidying up these broken links has always been considered easy, quick wins.
Phase Three: Outreach
When reaching out to webmasters, there are two different strategies you can use when notifying them of the broken links. The first outreach strategy is what I call “The Replacement Strategy”. With it, you’re notifying the webmaster that there is a broken link on their site and you have a resource that would be relevant and valuable enough to take its place. It looks something like this:
Good Morning, I hope your Friday is going well. My name is Ted, and I’m reaching out on behalf of my client’s company. Today, I came across the helpful page of the website, located below: www.url.edu I found the page to be an impressive compilation of resources for those researching your resource strategies. I wanted to let you know that the resource titled “Broken Link Anchor Text” is leading your visitors to a broken page. If you are looking for a comparable resource to replace it, I would suggest my site’s resource titled “Resource Title”. Short description of the resource Below is the URL to the resume-writing resource
The other strategy is notifying the webmaster of the broken page and informing them the page moved to a new location. Then, let the webmaster know you have a piece of content that would work well instead. (See how important quality content is for link building?) This strategy comes off less predatory and more helpful. This works well when you find a broken link in a related field as your content, but is not a direct replacement. An example outreach for this strategy would look something look very similar to the example above but adjusted a bit to fit your pitch:
. I wanted to let you know that the resource titled “Broken Link” is no longer being supported but has since moved to this location “Working Link”. I also wanted to reach out to see if you would be open to sharing an additional resource with your community titled “Our Really Cool Resource” published by Our Website. Short description of the resource…
With all link building outreach, the most important things you can do is follow up. I acquire roughly 10% of my links by sending a quick follow up about 7 to 14 days after my initial email. Our team doesn’t let these golden opportunities go to waste because of a busy inbox.
But it’s not entirely foolproof, and there’s some nuance to doing it well.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get backlinks from broken link building.
But first, let’s cover the basics.
- What is broken link building?
- Does broken link building still work?Broken link building is a tactic that takes advantage of broken pages on the web. It involves finding a dead page and asking linkers to swap the links to a working page on your site. The idea is that they’ll do this as they don’t want to send visitors to a dead resource.
Does broken link building still work?
It would be fair to say that SEOs are somewhat divided when it comes to this question.
In one video, Mark from Authority Hacker said:
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an almost pointless tactic, and you shouldn’t waste your time with it.
If you dig through the comments on that video, one stands out:
-
How to do broken link building
Broken link building is a four-step process.
- Find broken pages with backlinks
- Vet the backlinks
- Create a replacement page
- Do outreach
1. Find broken pages with backlinks
It’s impossible to find highly linked broken pages without SEO tools. Even if you find dead pages manually, you’ll need a backlink checker to see how many links they have. You can use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker for this, but life is much easier with full access to Ahrefs.
Keep this in mind as we go through the tactics below. You’ll need Ahrefs for ¾ of them.
Here are the tactics:
- Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
- Look for broken pages about a topic
- Look for broken links on competing websites
- Look for broken links on resource pages (doable without paid Ahrefs)
a) Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
Many of your competitors will have at least some dead pages because everyone moves, deletes, and reorganizes content over time. If they forget to redirect old URLs when doing this, their backlinks will point to broken pages.
Here’s how to find dead pages on your competitors’ websites:
- Go to Site Explorer
- Enter a competing domain
- Go to the Best by links report
- Filter for “404 not found” pages
- Sort the report by Referring domains from highest to lowest
For example, there are 134 dead pages on Content Marketing Institute’s website, and some have backlinks from over 50 referring domains.
In Summary…
Broken link building is an effective strategy because it allows marketers to start a relationship with a webmaster by helping them, first. The webmaster might not always swap out the broken link for your working link, but they are more likely to open your emails and respond more frequently – and when rejection, avoidance or no response is part of the job – that communication is a win.
Then you need to check for broken links on these pages, which you can do for free with Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar.
Visit the page
Click the toolbar icon
Go to the “Links” tab
Click “Check status”
Filter for broken links only
 to identify broken links Building on a page. I’ll look for resource banks where my piece of){kind=link}