Broken Link Building: How to Make Use of It?

Probably if you are doing your own SEO, you might know how important is link building for ranking your website higher in search engine results pages. For this, you need to spend hours on finding the right blogs, brainstorming for unique topics, creating awesome content – all for that one link. It can be too painful and time consuming. Fortunately, there’s a way to break free of this grind and that is through broken link building.

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken Link Building, also called as dead link building is a process that involves pointing out a link on another website that is no longer working and also asking for a link to your website. Most often, the broken link leads to a 404 page. The idea is to find broken links on other’s sites, point out and how to fix them and in turn, suggest your link to be added or to be used as replacement.

Why Is It Gaining More Popularity?

• One biggest advantage of broken link building is that the pages you rebuild are already proven themselves to be great link bait.

• People who linked to it in the past are likely to link to you now.

• You can enjoy more current links by sharing it through social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc

• It provides room for getting more in-content authority links.

• It serves as a rich source of proven attractive links.

• And finally, it bypasses almost all brainstorming involved with link baiting.

How to Discover Broken Links?

• Advanced Search Queries: The most popular method of finding broken links is by using Google advanced search queries. It guides you through areas of opportunity for reach out with virtually no cost involved. Make use of Google Chrome Check My Links Extension on any webpage to crawl the link or resource directory for broken links.

• OSE Competitor Backlinks: Yet another way to find broken links is by Open Site Explorer (OSE) to find competitor backlinks. Check the Top Pages Tab in OSE for any site in niche and look for 404 pages with external links pointing at them in Top Pages tab.

• Screaming Frog Method: The Screaming Frog method enables you to crawl through your competitor’s sites, find all 404 URLs and run a backlink analysis to find out who is linking to them.  Ahrefs site explorer is a great tool for this.  Once found, you can offer to allow them to link to the corresponding content on your site instead.

How to Make Use of It?

• To begin with, you need to identify web pages with broken links and isolate any outgoing links that direct to 404 error pages. For this, you can make use of any of the above listed 3 methods of discovering broken links.

• Once you have spotted the broken links, evaluate your linking opportunities. The best broken link building opportunities are those that are still actively managed by their webmasters and are relevant to your website’s content and have backlinks pointing at them. Filter out the best opportunity to pursue so that they offer the greatest possible benefit to your site.

• After prioritizing broken link building opportunities, you need to find the webmaster’s contact information in order to send your request.

• Inform the webmaster that they have a broken link on their site and extend an invitation to replace the broken link with your new and improved page. Make sure that your approach is respectful and polite. Bear in mind that your motive here is to help them as well as yourself. Also we cannot expect every webmaster to accept your invitation, so don’t be discouraged if you didn’t receive any reply from them.

Broken link building involves lots of efforts and time but can definitely reap the greatest reward and who knows, it may even guide you to a whole new business relationship. Wait and watch!!