What are Some Useful Broken Link Building Strategies for SEO?

Link building is an integral part of SEO. More authoritative and organic backlinks mean higher credibility. Higher credibility will earn a higher ranking in the SERPs and higher traffic as well.

Links building is a time-consuming and tedious job, requiring deep insight into SEO and link-building strategies.  Since every website strives for links, it is necessary to take advantage of every possibility of link-building, and broken link-building is one of them.

What is Broken Links

If the hyperlinked text does not take you to the linked website or page, that link is called broken. A 404 error is usually displayed for the broken link. A visitor does not like the broken link, as it does not give the required information, creating a bad user experience.

 A bad user experience negatively impacts your website’s authority and ranking. Google takes action against broken links and lowers your ranking. So, replacing the broken links is necessary for a better ranking is necessary.

So, if a broken link is rebuilt, it is a win-win situation for both. The referred site gets a well-established link, and the referring domain gets a rebuilt.

Also Read: Effects Of Broken Backlinks | How to Fix Them?

Reasons for Broken Link

The following are the reasons for the broken links.

1. A page is very old, and the information is absolute, so the website has removed it.
2. The website has been taken down for some reasons.
3. The URL of the page has been changed during the revamping process.
4. The URL has been typed incorrectly at the time of insertion.

Benefits of Building Broken Links

Following are the benefits of building broken links.

1. It gives an excellent, authoritative link, increasing your credibility.
2. It can help you to get more referral and relevant traffic.
3. It helps you to get an established working link.
4. It can also help you generate more relevant and highly demanding content.

How to build Broken Links

Building broken links is a laborious and unexciting job that requires a handful of skills to find the broken links and then replace them with relevant and exciting content. Following are some tips for finding broken links.

Finding Broken Links

Finding broken links is the most important thing in link building. It can be found by clicking each link on every page of your targeted website. But it will take ages to find them this way. So, the best part is to audit your targeted website’s backlink using SEO tools.

• These tools are extremely effective in finding broken links. Folling procedure can be adopted for the SEMrush.
• Open the backlink tool of SEMrush, enter the domain, and start an audit. 
• Then, configure the tool, go to the audit tab, and check the target URL error.
• This will give you all the links with the 4XX and 5XX errors, where the former is the client error and the latter is the server error. You can also exclude all the spammy backlinks from the list by going to the toxicity score and selecting 0-44 non-toxic.
• So, this will give you a list of all broken links.
• You can export these links and start working on them.
•  One can not replace all broken links. So, find the relevant links.
• Prepare your content accordingly and contact the webmaster for the replacement.
• Repeat the same procedure on other relevant websites as well.

Resources Pages

Resource pages used to have high traffic, providing links to other websites. Some of these links might be broken and need replacement.  One can use Google to find these research pages.  These can be found by simply typing.

Keyword intitle:resources inurl:links.html

For example, the following are the results when I searched the keyword “Honey.”

After finding the resources pages, one can use SEO tools to find the broken pages; for example, Ahref’s SEO toolbar can greatly benefit from finding the broken links. Download that tool and use it by following the below instructions.

• Visit the targeted page and click the toolbar icon.
• Go to the links and check the status.
• Use the filter broken links only.
• This will give you the details of all broken links on that page.
• One can also use the Check My Links extension to find the broken links on the resource pages, which gives on-site results.

Wikipedia Pages

Wikipedia is another source of dead links, which many people visit daily. So, having a link on Wikipedia pages will give you high credibility and good traffic.

Finding the broken links on these pages is easy.  Just use Google Operators to find them. For example, the following results when I searched for a keyword link building with the template mentioned in the search bar.

This presents you with a list that has broken links and needs replacement. Find the relevant pages and link and then offer a replacement link.

Also Read: What are Contextual Backlinks and How to Create Them?

Competitive Analysis

In the present world, you can not win in the digital world without outsmarting your competitors. Compile a list of your competitors and do a backlink audit. This will provide you with a list of broken links of your competitors that can be replaced.

Narrow down this list based on relevancy and archive of your content and contact the webmaster for the replacement. You have to do this for each of your competitors.

How to Outreach for the Broken Link Replacement.

After finding the broken links, it is time to contact the webmaster for a replacement. For the replacement, you need to have the relevant content. The following are some tips for outreach.

Prepare your content.

After finding the broken link, you need to prepare the relevant content. You can reproduce or improve the same content with better quality. If you are offering copy-pasted content, then it will be turned down. So, work on your content so that the webmaster happily replaces it.

Produce genuine, relevant, updated, informative content embedded with infographics and stats. If you offer an improved version of the broken link, it will be very hard to ignore.

Write to the Webmaster.

Please write the webmaster about the broken link and offer him similar but updated content. You may add the abstract of your content to your email, but it should not exceed more than 3 to 4 lines.

You can attach the full content in the email. Ensure you remained polite and to the point during the conversation.  Ensure you have all the spices in your email to attract the webmaster’s attention.

Also Read: What is Backlink Analysis and How to Perform?

Follow-up

You should consider yourself very lucky if you get a reply to the first email, as most web admins receive many emails. So, keep following up until you get a response.

Conclusions

Broken links are a great opportunity to earn backlinks with high authority and gain some convertible traffic. These broken links are created because of a website’s upgrade, a page’s removal, misspelling of link or switching to a new host. Following is the summary of broken link-building strategies.

• First, find the broken links using SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.
• Analyse your competitors to find their broken links and then try to replace these links with similar content.
• Resource pages are a big source of broken links. Find them and replace them with your links.
• Find the broken links on the relevant Wikipedia pages and replace them with your links.
• The last step in the link building is to contact the webmaster. Prepare the relevant content in replacement. This content should be updated and a refined version of the old content. Write to the webmaster precisely about the broken link and what you offer as a replacement. Keep following up with the webmaster until you get a call for the replacement.

Link building is a specialised job requiring deep, insightful SEO information. Dlinx Outreach is an SEO agency with a team of experts offering multiple services, and link building is one of them. We have a subscription of tools to help us find the broken links. Feel free to contact us for further information.

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