SEO is becoming more challenging over the years, so you must reconsider your ineffective link-building technique to build links. A broken link-building technique is one of the most popular.
Comprehensive link-building tactic requires various techniques to achieve the goals. The broken link-building technique works perfectly for any website in any niche to build hundreds of quality backlinks and create the most authoritative sites in your niche.
This blog post will teach you how to get backlinks from broken link building. Are you ready?
Let’s get started,
What Is Broken Link Building?
Jumping right into broken link building, let’s start with some basis. What is a broken link? A broken link is a web page a user can’t find or access for various reasons. Web servers often return an error message when users try to access a broken link.
Examples of a broken link error code are as follows,
404 Page Not Found: This means the page has not existed on the server
400 Bad Request: Cannot understand the URL on your page by the host server
Image Source – Google Support
I hope you understand broken links; let’s see what broken link-building is.
Broken link-building replaces links on another site that needs to be fixed with your broken link-building, which can yield higher conversion rates than many other tried-and-true link-building strategies. Dead Link Building practice replacing backlinks with links to 404 pages with a working link to a target website.
What are the Benefits of Broken Link Building?
Broken link building is a technique that involves contacting webmasters to acquire inbound or internal links by creating quality content. It will affect your Google search results, but they won’t impact your overall SEO.
Fixing backlinks is essential for website maintenance and a marketing opportunity. The broken link-building research helps with SEO in two ways.
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Refreshing of Content – Google prioritizes new content and monitors your site for broken links allowing you to update the entire page.
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Link-building opportunities – An ethical and legitimate way of obtaining backlinks is broken link-building on external sites.
Google treats certain types of backlinks like votes of confidence, driving valuable referral traffic; thus, backlinks can benefit your SEO.
The more authoritative site you have, if higher the quality and quantity of backlinks, which can lead to higher search engine rankings.
Broken link-building can have a higher success rate than other link-building tactics. You’re helping web admins solve an issue on their site and provide a reason to link to you.
Types of Broken link building strategies
The first step involved in broken link-building is Identifying a broken link. Then, contact the website’s webmaster to recommend a similar piece of content that includes a link to an alternative website.
Moreover, it’s a scalable link-building strategy that brings good results with minimum effort. The most influential and scalable link-building success will depend on how accomplished you are at creating genuinely valuable content that webmasters want to link to.
#1. Resource Page Targeting with Keywords
For targeting keywords with resource pages, you may first focus on identifying resource pages with links to keyword-relevant content. After extracting links from those pieces of content, you will focus on the location of broken content and actively pursue the opportunities.
Even if they’re less popular with the searchers, filter through your target keywords and pick general terms; you can use Google keyword planner and other keyword research software to get more keyword ideas.
The next task is to scrape every result from these searches. And this is done before you move on to extracting those all-important links. These links must be checked for errors before establishing the potential prospects within every link you are left with.
#2. Resource Page Targeting with URLs
For targeting resource pages with URLs, you may need to find similar websites with whom you occupy the same niche. After that, analyze those websites for broken links.
Narrow down your search to the exact URL to have a better match to your content and keywords. Begin with an already-recognized website, and digging this website’s backlinks will uncover resource pages, ultimately leading to successfully picking relevant link-building opportunities.
Several tools and techniques can be used for broken link building. Also, there are some factors you must consider in identifying the perfect site or URL.
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Non-commercial: There will be too much-manipulated link noise in their backlink profile If the site is directly encouraged to acquire links.
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Authoritative: The site must be authoritative, or it may attract a few links from resources that aggregate essential links on the web. These are the resource pages from which we will find 404 opportunities, and It is a waste of time if you are not linking to the selected URL.
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Relevant: The site needs to be relevant to your industry.
#3. Direct URL Targeting
In the previous two methods, i.e., resource page targeting with keywords and resource page targeting with URLs where you are trying to find potentially broken content to replace. And the link will be prospects who link to that broken content. But in this method, you have already chosen your link prospect and simply want to find broken links on that site as an excuse to start a conversation.
How to Find Backlinks and Leverage Broken Link Building?
Suppose you are checking the links manually; you may need some tools. Using the backlink checker to see how many links they have. You can use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker; simply enter the domain name or specific URL you want to analyze. This could be a page on your website or a competitor’s site.
The Backlink Checker then provides a detailed backlink profile, including the ratio of follow links to nofollow links, the number of referring domains, etc.
https://unifiedist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/ahrefs-free-backlink-checker.mp4
#1. Identify Broken Pages With Backlinks
The first tactic is Looking for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks. Your competitors have at least some dead pages. Over time they delete or reorganize their content. Their backlinks will point to broken pages if they forget to redirect old URLs when doing this.
How to find broken links or dead pages on your competitors’ websites? For this, you can follow these steps:
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Go to Ahrefs broken link checker
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Enter a competing domain of your niche
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Go to the Best by Links report
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Look for 404 not found pages
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By referring domains from highest to lowest, sort the report
https://unifiedist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/broken-link-checker.mp4
For example, Let’s consider our competitor; there are nine broken pages on the Growfusely website, So here, I need to create content after sifting through these pages for topics, and it should make sense to create content about them.
There is a page about “Marketing KPIs and Metrics SaaS business must have,” which will be taken and create sense for us because we have a blog category about KPIs and SaaS metrics. We want to build links to this kind of topic. Repeat the process for other competitors, If you don’t find a relevant broken page on one competitor’s website.
#2. Vetting Your Prospects Link
Many people jump straight to a mistake, immediately creating replacement content for the broken page without vetting it. When you vet a link, you can understand what that page needs based on its current state. For two reasons, jumping straight to creating a replacement page for a broken page must be corrected.
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A good backlink will not be there for the broken page you found. Pursuing a broken page with poor-quality backlinks makes creating a replacement page worthless.
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To create a replacement page, you must understand why people link to the broken link. Keeping your content and outreach in sync leads to higher success rates.
Image Source – Ahrefs
So while Vetting a link, you need to check if the page has good backlinks and whether your replacement resource page aligns with people previously linked to it. And remember to stop pursuing replacement pages if it doesn’t have any worthy backlinks.
How To Check the Quality of a Link?
As I mentioned before, you need to check the quality of the link. right?
Before pursuing a broken page, check to see if they have high-quality links. To check the quality of links on a broken page, For this, you can follow these steps:
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Go to Ahrefs site explorer
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Enter the dead page’s URL
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Set the grouping mode to “one link per domain in the backlink reports.
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Also, set “show history” to “Don’t show.”
Image Source – Ahrefs
Now manually check the links, which is inefficient and takes too much time. I recommend you filter the report using filters to speed up the process. All have different ways to find their quality links, but you can follow the filter to find quality links.
- “DoFollow” – Exclude low-quality links from directories, blog comments, and forums.
- Subdomains – This filter excludes posts from sites like Blogspot because they usually have low-quality spammy links.
- DR5+– Use this filter to exclude websites that have low domain authority.
Domain traffic – 20+. Using this filter, you can exclude links from websites with low traffic.
How to check the link reasons?
Checking reasons for linking plays a crucial role in broken link-building games. So here, you must find out why people linked to the broken pages. By checking the link reasons, you can come up with outreach ideas suitable for the page while connecting to the website owner of the page.
To do this, you can consider two types of link reasons, as shown below,
General links – These are links that people use to link as a whole resource. They may not have found any particular topic inside but instead contains a general topic. You won’t be able to find any specific content showing why people linked to it.
Deep links – As they may contain information about a specific topic, they are linked as a resource. You can see why people linked it as a resource page.
Things to keep in mind while linking reasons:
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Focus on finding deep links more than general links.
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Deep links offer deeper insights into why people link it as a resource.
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Replacement content can be crafted for the broken page using deep links.
#3. Build a Replacement Page For the Dead Pages
Now you got a clear idea why you must check reasons for links. Now it’s time to build a replacement page for the dead pages.
For this, we need three steps,
Come up with a Rough Outline
You do not want to copy the content inside the dead page. Instead, you can use your new content’s headings and subheadings as outlines. The goal is to make different content, but the purpose of the content and the tone must remain the same, but the contents must be different.
Create Points that Can Link to Naturally
Here you must be careful with the content; it must be worth linking to and possess accurate content. Try to link outdated statistics or data with newer ones. Linking the content with strong and natural links can help the outreach process becomes more straightforward because it is easier to justify why this page was linked.
Find Different Ways to Improve Your Content
Only a tiny portion of broken pages consists of deep links, most links are general. Moreover, with general links, you can’t find any specific reason they are linked to a page. So this allows you to improve the content, but not so much because there are fewer deep links.
Focus on other areas to improve. Besides this, general linkers would have a purpose to link to the page; improving your content will also strengthen your value proposition.
Let’s see a few other ways to improve content:
Simplify: Make it easier to understand and more accessible.
Visualize: Use graphics to explain the concepts of the topics.
Templatize: Add templates to give more indeed content for the people.
Rectify: Fix inaccuracies and rectify the content.
#4. Identify Outreach Contacts
You might be contacting the people linking to the broken page for outreach. After finding the contacts, you must pitch them with your idea for a replacement page.
Outreaching can be done in one of two ways:
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Shotgun outreach – Sending the same generic email without personalizing it.
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Sniper outreach – Sending emails that are unique and personal.
Shotgun outreach and Sniper outreach have advantages and disadvantages, but the best way is a mix of both. You can segment your prospects into smaller groups and create personalized email templates depending on the group, Instead of sending generic emails to everyone. Remember to segment your prospects into general linkers and deep linkers. You may need to follow the different ways to target and pitch ideas for both groups.
Key Takeaways to Use Broken Links to Get More Backlinks
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A broken link is a web address which a dead page that can’t take the user to the original page.
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When you click on a broken link, the page cannot be found, and an error 404 page will appear.
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A broken link-building technique is being relevant to the page content and finding pages in your niche.
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The broken link-building technique involves asking the website owner if they can use the broken link to connect to your site.
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The broken link-building technique is a process where you have to create high-quality content.
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Intending to acquire inbound links helps to conduct outreach to other websites.
Final Thoughts
Broken link building is a complex process, but it is worth waiting to get high-quality links because it helps you to improve your domain authority. Broken link-building strategies are one of the components of an effective link-building strategy, and it is a powerful technique if you successfully implement it carefully and flawlessly. And it must align with the search engine that can significantly boost your website’s traffic.
