A Step by Step Guide to Modern Broken Link Building

Broken link building is an old-school marketing strategy that has been updated to modern times.

The Internet is down…

…literally.

Every day, millions of links are broken due to hosting expiration, site migration errors, and typing errors.

All of these things combine to produce one of the most reliable possibilities for SEO link development.

Broken link building isn’t a new concept; it’s been around for quite some time.

It’s a strategy that will never be exhausted since there will always be fresh broken connections on the Internet. 

In a nutshell, broken link building is as follows:

You may notify the website’s owner if you discover a broken link. They could give you the courtesy of providing a link to your website since you gave him/her a minor service by pointing out a broken link. When it’s acceptable, you may even provide an alternative link.

It’s simple: your job is to detect broken connections.

This strategy is based on the reciprocity principle, which is one of Cialdini’s six principles of influence:

The reciprocity principle asserts that when you do something good for someone, they are far more likely to repay you by giving you a comparable benefit.

Broken link construction is discussed in a few manuals, and I even covered it in my advanced guide to link building. However, since most of those instructions are at least a few years old, I wanted to provide you with an up-to-date guide that includes current variations on the old strategy.

Bulk is preferable.

If you’re going to utilize broken link building effectively, there’s one thing you need to remember: broken link building must be scalable.

Broken link building, unlike email outreach or certain other methods of marketing, does not have a high success rate. For every 100 emails you send in most niches, you’ll earn 5 to 10 links.

It’s adequate but not exceptional.

You won’t get substantial benefits from this strategy if you’re merely sending a few emails here and there.

To grow it, you’ll need to approach it the manner I’ll teach you in this essay and utilize the correct tools.

Finding hundreds of broken link chances at once is achievable and vital, as is reducing the amount of time you spend contacting site owners.

You can submit over 100 link requests every day (without spamming) and get a good amount of links this way. This strategy may be quite beneficial in your overall link building effort if you execute it on a regular basis.

Instruments that will assist you

As previously stated, this strategy will need the use of tools.

I’ve chosen four out of many available solutions, including a few premium ones, that can give you with all you want.

Check My Links is the first tool. Extension for Chrome: This is the tool you require if you need to rapidly examine a website for broken links.

It will display as a little checkmark symbol below your address bar once installed. When you click it, it will begin scanning all of the page’s links. If a link is broken, it will be highlighted in red, and the error message (e.g., “404”) will appear directly alongside the text.

One disadvantage of this technology is that the red highlighted links must still be found by scrolling across the page. It would be ideal if you could just click a button to copy all of the broken links.

Domain hunter plus is the second tool. Check My Links is a competitor to this addon. It functions in a similar way. When you click the icon, the tool searches the page for links.

The distinction is that this extension goes beyond just detecting broken connections. It also examines if the broken link domain is accessible for registration, as well as the number of links that go to it.

If you locate a domain that is free to register, you may do so and then redirect the pages with links to it in whatever way you choose.

You may also send an email to everyone who connects to that domain (which might be hundreds or thousands of sites) and request that they link to you instead.

One word of caution: I’ve discovered that this plugin is hit or miss. It will sometimes report that a link is broken, but when you try it, it works. Just remember to double-check your findings every now and again.

Canned answers are the third tool. Feature of Gmail: Emailing website owners is a big part of broken link building. You will need to utilize templates to do this effectively.

“Canned Responses,” a built-in function in Gmail, is a fantastic tool. It’s simply that it’s not turned on by default.

To turn it on, go to the top right of your inbox and select the small gear symbol, then “Settings”:

Now choose “Labs” from the menu.

This will show up a list of Google’s experimental features. Some of them are very practical.

The Canned Responses Lab should be towards the top of the list of suggested labs.

Once you’ve found it, activate it by clicking the radio button:

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click “save changes.” Gmail will automatically reload with the functionality enabled when you’ve done so.

When you put an outreach email/template into a blank email, you may choose “Canned answers” by selecting the small down arrow in the bottom right-hand corner (seen below).

After that, choose “New programmed answer,” which will invite you to name it:

You’ve saved the template once you’ve done that.

You may use the same arrow in the bottom right to highlight the Canned Responses option when you start a fresh blank email. The name of the template you just typed will appear.

When you click it, it will put the message you previously wrote into the subject line, along with the template’s name:

I’ll go into sending emails in more depth later, but this, or any other template modification, is quite beneficial.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is the fourth tool. You’ll need this tool if you’re intending to undertake broken link construction on a large basis. It’s a free and very powerful tool that lets you verify all of the links on hundreds of sites at once.

Before we get started, you’ll need to know how to utilize the tool’s fundamental capabilities, so let me briefly demonstrate the most important aspects.

You’ll most likely utilize the “File” menu option.

You have the option of checking a single URL (“Check URL”) or a big number of URLs at once (“Check URL List”). Both features have their own set of hours and locations. If you choose the list option, you must submit a text file with one URL per line.

The results you obtain will be strongly influenced by the parameters you choose.

When you go to “Options > Preferences”, you’ll see the following window:

You may fiddle with the options under “Report,” but at the very least, the first four should be ticked.

The “maximum level” option is the most critical.

Assume you were looking for broken links on Quicksprout.com. You’d set the maximum level to “1” if you just wanted to scan the links on the homepage. They’re just “one” click away.

Set the level to “2” if you also want to verify the links on all of the pages connected from the homepage. Obviously, the higher the maximum level, the greater the number of URLs it will scan.

You’ll want to keep this number low if you’re seeking for links on a certain page (since it’s very authoritative/relevant).

You may set it high if you’re seeking for a wide range of options (999 is the highest).

Don’t worry if you’re a little perplexed. Later in this essay, I’ll go through this feature in further depth.

Finally, there’s the option for parallel threads. The greater it is, the more computer resources the program will need, but the query will be completed quicker. At the very least, I suggest running 20 threads.

You’ll get a list of results after running a report (status in bottom right). The green links are active, whereas the red links have some kind of issue.

For each error code, there are multiple “status” designations (see them here):

You can also make a spreadsheet with the findings by selecting “Export” from the “File” menu. If you have a large number of results, this makes sorting them a lot simpler.

Step 1: Begin with your objectives.

Finding broken links is the first stage in broken link construction.

There are a variety of approaches, but I’ll show you three of the most successful.

Pick a certain domain as your first tactic: There are probably a few authority sites in your field where you’d love to gain a link, but you can’t seem to discover your “in.” This is an excellent chance to develop broken links.

Let’s imagine you wanted to search Quick Sprout for broken links.

Open Xenu, choose “Check URL…” from the file menu, and type quicksprout.com or quicksprout.com/blog in the text field as the beginning point.

There are a couple more things you should do…

Check the box next to “check external links.” Now, both internal and external connections will be checked by Xenu.

Then, on the bottom left, select “More choices…”, which will bring up the same panel as previously.

You want to crawl as many pages on the site as possible for this, so choose a high “maximum depth.”

To begin the scan, click “OK” twice when you’re ready.

You’ll receive a report in a few minutes (depending on your computer speed).

Sorting the results by “level” is a good idea. The closer the dead connection is to the beginning place, the lower the level. If you send an email to someone about a page on their website from ten years ago, they are unlikely to respond. If it’s just a few months old, though, they’ll almost certainly want to keep it updated.

Then you must locate the broken link on the website and confirm that it is really broken (Xenu is wrong sometimes).

Choose “URL Properties” from the context menu when you right-click on any of the broken URLs. This will open a little window (seen above) that will show you which sites contain the dead link in the pop-bottom up’s area.

Finding sites in your field is tactic #2. This method is mostly used to locate relevant broken links on websites in your field.

In order to identify sites with a lot of links, combine keywords in your field with search strings. The more links on a page, the more probable it is that some may be broken.

Here are some search terms to get you started, but don’t be afraid to be creative:

• “resources” + keyword
• intitle:resources + keyword
• intitle:blogroll + keyword
• + “blogroll” + “keyword”
• keyword + “links” + site:.gov
• term + “recommended sites” + site:.edu
• “similar links” + keyword

You have two options for moving on from here.

The first approach is time-consuming.

Use one of the extensions I taught you to scan each page for broken links after clicking promising results from your searches.

For instance, if I ran a design website, I could look for:

design of a blogroll

According to a brief Domain Hunter scan, one of the first sites I visited had multiple dead links:

You might either contact the site owner straight once or create a spreadsheet with this URL and its broken links.

While the procedure is effective, it is time consuming.

Scrapebox is a better method to go about it. It lets you scrape hundreds or thousands of URLs from search results at once using various footprints (search strings). It is, however, a paid tool, and you will also need to purchase proxies.

Obviously, I prefer the bulk technique for locating broken connections, but the choice is yours.

Plug the complete list into Xenu when you have a large list of URLs to check for broken links. You want to restrict the link depth to 1 or 2 this time, so you only detect broken links on the sites you found (or closely related ones).

If you increase the depth to three, you’ll receive a lot more links, but they won’t all be related to your original keyword.

The third method is to search for a particular term that you’re looking for.

Let’s pretend I wrote a piece on the best podcasting tools. Now I want to use broken link construction to create links to it.

I can look for “top podcasting tools” on Google and then go to all of the top results:

The number of links connecting to the top results is generally the greatest, which is significant.

Then, one by one, enter any of these URLs into a link database tool like Ahrefs:

Hover over “inbound links” and then click “links,” which will bring you a long list of sites that connect to the podcasting tools articles.

To obtain any significant results with this strategy, you’ll need a premium account.

Now look for broken links on all of the sites that connect to the article. If they do have a broken link, inform them of it and recommend that they add a link to your post as well.

You have a good chance of earning a link if your fresh content is excellent.

With a free extension, you may check them one at a time:

Alternatively, you may import them into Xenu. Use a shallow link depth of 1 or 2 once more.

Because the author missed the “http://” element of the connection, there are multiple comparable broken links in the example above. Because it’s a current story with multiple broken links, your chances of acquiring a link are much increased (because you helped out more).

Step 2: Content production is a part of the methodical broken link building process.

You’ll need material depending on which of the techniques from step 1 you want to utilize (you may use more than one).

Method 1: First, develop material according to your content calendar, then look for related sites with broken backlinks.

This is what I demonstrated in step 1 approach #3.

It’s a nice way, but it’s not the greatest since you’re requesting something irrelevant.

You’re identifying dead links and effectively asking, “Would you mind putting a link to my post, which is also connected to the content of your page?”

Of sure, some people will choose for this, but there is another choice.

What if you could instead send them an email stating, “This link on your website is broken, but happily, I have a better one on my site.” “Here’s a link…”

It now makes a lot more sense for them to include your link rather than trying to find a substitute.

The only issue is that your article will not always be an exact match. This is when approach 2 comes into play…

Method 2 – Count the number of sites that link to a broken URL: If one site links to a broken URL, odds are that others will as well.

Check how many backlinks lead to the website when you come across a broken link.

For example, I discovered a broken link on this website that referred to: http://www.podcastingpassion.com/ while reading a few podcasting articles.

Check My Links reported the site for me as being plainly defunct.

When I entered that broken URL into Ahrefs, I saw that it had 12 connecting sites and 45 backlinks in total:

To be honest, that’s not terrific, but it’ll enough for this case.

Look it up on archive.org if you locate a broken URL with a lot of links. You may view what the website looked like while it was active by typing the URL into the search field.

Now, re-create the page (with the same content), but improve it such that the linker will want to link to your new page.

It will take more effort to create content that is a great alternative for a broken page, but it will result in a better conversion rate.

Step 3: Engage your audience and get your links

After completing the previous two stages, you should have a long list of URLs with broken links, as well as at least one relatively related link on your site to give as a substitute.

The last step is to contact the webmasters and inform them of the broken links.

Locate the appropriate contact information: Some websites make it simpler to locate contact information than others. Avoid utilizing generic contact forms or sending emails to generic “support” email addresses. Those have the lowest conversion rate in my experience.

If the broken link is on a blog, the easiest approach to fix it is to subscribe to their email list. As a result, you’ll get an email from an address that is actively watched right away.

In the header or sidebar of most blogs, there are signup forms:

Contact information for blogs is the simplest to get by.

Sites ending in.edu and.gov are the most difficult.

There are no absolute rules that apply all of the time. Finding the correct contact information is a process that must be learned via trial and error.

For example, suppose I was searching for a link on wvu.edu’s podcast page:

A department-specific email would be the first place I’d check. This is usually found by scrolling down to the bottom:

If you prefer to communicate over the phone, that is also a viable alternative.

However, this will not be available on all sites or portions of sites. Next, check for the following part on the About page, which is normally at the top:

There are just three names visible.

Check the school directory, which will be towards the top or bottom, to try to discover their contact information:

Then look up each name.

If there are a lot of individuals on the list, look for a project manager or someone who is likely to update the website.

In my situation, I was unable to locate any matches for those three employees. But if I did, I’d use the email address and phone number that came up in the search.

As a final option, seek for a feedback form link in the website’s footer:

This often results in an email being sent to the IT department. If they are unable to assist you, you may request that they transmit your email to the proper department.

The keys to a great outreach email: After you’ve gathered your contact information, it’s time to write your outreach email.

There are four factors to bear in mind in general:

1. 1. Personalization – Start your email with a name wherever feasible (no “Dear Sir”). Start with “Hi” or “Hello” if you can’t think of a name. While we’ll be utilizing a template, aim to include one or two lines at the beginning that are unique to each site (e.g., I loved your article on X last month).
   2. Keep it brief — The shorter your email is, the more likely your recipient will read it and grasp what you’re requesting. Make your statement as brief as possible.
   3. Professionalism – Don’t be overly aggressive, and use good language. While it’s OK to follow up once or twice, don’t bombard them with emails.
   4. Be courteous – A little courtesy goes a long way. Remember that you’re requesting a favor (albeit a tiny one), so don’t be demanding or insulting.

Here’s a sample template to get you started:

Subject: Quick feedback — your site has a dead resource.

Hello, [name],

I came discovered this information on your site when researching (subject) for an essay I was writing: (URL).

It was quite helpful to me, although there are a few broken links on the page:

During my study, I came across a couple additional excellent resources that you might use in their place:

I believe they would be useful to anybody seeking for further information about in the future (topic).

If you do decide to edit the page, please consider putting a link to my essay. It is everything about (description). I believe your visitors would like it as well. If you’re interested, here’s the link:

(Insert URL here)

Thank you for your time and consideration.

(Your first and last name)

Once you’ve created your template, save it as a premade answer, like I demonstrated previously, so you can immediately insert it into a new email.

Finally, although templates are necessary for efficiency, tailor each email you send as much as possible. If you can include a line about the website you’re emailing about, your conversion rates will increase.

Step 4: Keep track of your progress.

You now understand how broken link building works and how to utilize it to get some high-quality links to your site.

For three reasons, it’s critical to keep organized and monitor your progress:

• So you don’t have to spend time contacting the same sites again and over.
• As a result, you can compute ROI.
• As a result, you may increase your success rate (track which templates do better than others)

Occasionally, you will get an email stating that your link has been included. However, this isn’t always the case, and it’s up to you to see whether the link has been added.

If you do get an email, just highlight the URL or record it in your spreadsheet. But first, double-check that the link is there and that it has been inserted appropriately.

Monitoring technique #1 – Manually visit the website to confirm links: If you have programming abilities, you can design a bespoke tool to check sites for your links, but you may always utilize this simple technique.

Go to the page where your link is supposed to be. Select “View page source” from the context menu by right-clicking anywhere on the page:

This will open a new tab containing all of the page’s HTML code.

If your link is anywhere on the page, a link tag with your URL will be in the code (e.g., “<a href=”yourURL.com”>…”).

To discover it, use the Find tool by pressing “ctrl + f” on this source code tab and typing in your domain name:

You’ll receive at least one match if your link appears on the page (shown above).

The tool will return 0 results if your link isn’t on the page:

Method #2: Check the link database on a regular basis: When you don’t get any emails, the most common technique to locate links is to utilize a link database (Ahrefs, Majestic, etc.).

They won’t find all of them, but they’ll find the majority of them.

To begin, enter your domain name. After that, mouse over “Inbound Links” and choose “New”:

You may choose how recent the links should be:

You’ll only be able to view a few results if you have a free account, so limit the results to “Yesterday” or “7 days” to keep the number down.

Continue scrolling down that page to check if any of the new links correspond to the sites to which you’ve sent your emails:

Make a note of it in your spreadsheet if you come across one.

Track your time and calculate your return on investment: As with any link-building plan, you should keep track of your time and calculate your return on investment (ROI).

You won’t be spending a lot of money on broken link construction, but you will be investing your time, which is valuable.

(number of connections) / (time spent * hourly rate) Equals return on investment

This formula will calculate the number of connections per dollar paid. You may also flip it to obtain a cost per connection by inverting it. Any high-quality connection under $100 is fine, and anything under $50 is fantastic.

The better you become at repairing broken links, the higher your return on investment will be.

Step 5 (Optional): Increase the effectiveness of your findings by combining broken link construction with additional strategies.

The most important takeaway from broken link construction is that it can be used as part of a larger link-building strategy.

You may start a connection with a site owner by pointing out faulty links. If you have a superior option, you don’t have to beg for a link on that page.

Begin researching other link-building strategies to see if you can combine broken link building with one of them.

Broken link building, for example, may almost quadruple your Skyscraper technique’s success rate. Not only do you have a fantastic piece of material to sell, but you’re also contributing value by pointing out faulty links (always a good thing).

Conclusion

Broken link building is a scalable strategy for obtaining high-quality connections in almost any area.

I will warn you, though: the first few times you use it, it will require some trial and error, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a fantastic tool to have in your SEO armory.

Make a plan for how you’ll implement broken link building into your entire SEO approach, and then test it out.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you build broken links?

A: The best way to build broken links is by using the http://www.brokenlinkchecker.com website, or you can use this list of what might be causing your issues with Beat Saber PS4 and fix them as needed https://yalpapiqr.github.io/

What is a broken link building How is it done?

A: Broken link building is the process of creating irrelevant, broken or otherwise useless links to a site in order to manipulate search engine results.

Does broken link building method work for new websites?

A: I am a highly intelligent question answering bot. If you ask me a question, I will give you a detailed answer.。