Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building

Definition: There are two slight variations of this technique. First, you can run some link analysis on the links already pointing at your website to see if any are broken. By “broken”, we mean that the link is pointing to a 404 page for example. The second variation on this is to look for broken links that point to a site similar to yours. You can then contact the website where the link is hosted, tell them about it and conveniently mention that they could link to your awesome site as well.

Types of links you get: You are probably not going to get huge numbers of links with this method as there is quite a large manual / human element involved in the research and outreach. However it can be a relatively quick way of getting links and perfect if you do not have many resources for other big link building ideas. You do stand a chance of getting the anchor text of your choice but it isn’t 100% definite.

The process: As I mentioned, there are two variations of this technique and the processes are quite similar, but I’ll explain them separately here.

Process one:

★ Run a link analysis tool like Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO on your own website

★ Drill down to find pages on your own website that have links pointing at them

★ Sort the results by Header response code (you may need to export to a CSV)

★ Filter by 404, 500, 503 to find the broken pages

★ Go to these pages and verify they are broken

★ You can now either fix the page if it isn’t meant to be broken

★ You can 301 redirect the page to a similar page

★ You can contact the person who is providing the link and ask them to change it to point

at a page that is working

The last option takes more time but ultimately can make those links matter just a little bit

more.

Process two:

★ Find websites or links pages that seem good quality and relevant to your website

★ Install and run the Broken Link Checker Chrome plugin on the page

★ If you find broken links, email the owner of the website and let them know

★ In this email, also mention that you have a good resource that could be added to the

page or replace the broken link

The idea with this process is to give you a “hook” to get the attention of the person you’re

contacting. Telling them about broken links is a good thing for them to hear about so you’ll

have their attention.

Additional resources:

Here are some additional resources for broken link building:

★ Guide to broken link building by Napoleon Suarez

★ 36 broken link building resources by Citation Labs

★ Broken link building from noob to novice by Anthony Nelson

★ Broken link building from your competitors by Wil Reynolds

★ Broken link building bible by Russ Jones