Broken Link Building

Broken link building is a powerful SEO tactic where you find broken (dead) links on other websites and reach out to the site owner to propose your own page as a replacement.

The thing that makes this approach effective is that you’re offering to step in and help the person you’re outreaching to. After all, you’re pointing out something on their pages that’s broken and immediately offering a fix for them.

That level of helpfulness is one of the key reasons why broken link building has become one of the marketing landscape’s favourite white-hat link-building tactics.

Benefits of Broken Link Building

Broken link building works because there’s a clear incentive for the website owner to pay attention to your suggestions. Broken links are an inconvenience and have a negative impact for both readers and their own SEO.

When you flag one and offer a ready-made replacement that suits their needs, you’ve not only offered them an easy fix, but you’ve also provided them with a way to protect the experience their website offers visitors.

This approach works far more consistently than a cold ‘please link to my article’ plea through email outreach, which is more likely to offer no immediate value. It’s for this reason that broken link building trends tend to convert at a far better rate than plain outreach.

How to Use Broken Link Building

The best thing about broken link building is that it’s a very methodical strategy. You simply have to identify pages within your niche that are likely to contain outbound links.

With this in mind, resource pages, roundups, and well-referenced articles are your prime targets. You can then crawl those pages for broken links using a tool like Ahrefs, Check My Links, or Screaming Frog.

When you spot a dead link, you can check what the missing page used to be about. Using a tool like the Wayback Machine is a particularly effective approach here. After running this check, you’ll be able to confirm whether you have or are able to create a genuinely comparable replacement.

Finally, you can email the website owner, politely point out the broken link, and propose your own page as a fitting alternative. This doesn’t have to be a hard sell but more of a useful heads-up.

Strategy Drawbacks

One of the biggest problems with broken link building is that it can be a time-intensive strategy for the number of links it produces.

You’ll likely find yourself checking masses of pages and finding broken links that aren’t the right fit for your content and sending a lot of outreach emails that won’t even be read by the recipient.

Conversion rates tend to be modest at best, and everything will depend on whether you have a relevant page to offer. For instance, if the dead link pointed to a detailed statistics page and you only have a thin blog post, the swap is unlikely to be a success.

As a result, broken link building tends to work as one tactic among many other approaches, rather than your primary SEO strategy.

Qualitative Links

Where broken link building tends to excel is in generating quality-focused backlinks rather than forging a higher quantity of links.

Generally speaking, the links that you end up with are more contextually relevant and editorially placed, which can help them to hold their value more over time.

The research that you conduct along the way can also feed into your other campaigns because you’re finding which resource pages and articles link out within your niche. So even when your link count isn’t rising significantly, the work you’re putting in is still highly useful.

With this in mind, it’s worth noting that broken link building has been a long-term SEO strategy that many website owners have become wary of. The chances are that you won’t be the first person to suggest a replacement link, and this could mean that recipients are less likely to be receptive to your suggestions.

As a rule of thumb, try to keep your outreach more personal, and only suggest your link if it’s a genuine fit. This can help you to not only get the best results out of your strategy but also build positive relationships that could lead to more backlinks in the future.