As a link building tactic, broken link building is an effective, white-hat, scalable, content-focused link building strategy that builds links through finding broken links, recreating that broken content, and helping webmasters replace broken links with your corrected link.
Broken link building may perhaps be the most effective, white-hat link building strategy in years. In particular, broken link building is appealing because the success of the campaign is directly proportional to how much good you do for the web. You profit only if you create good content to replace lost or abandoned content that webmasters still want to link to. This is the type of strategy that marries so many of the competing interests our industry: content vs. links, link earning vs link building, inbound vs. outbound, etc.
Below, I attempt to organize as much as I know about broken link building tactics. Throughout the piece I mention tools that will help you make the broken link building process scalable and less monotonous. Let's begin.
Table of Contents
- Overview
- Prospecting
- Content Creation
- Outreach
- Conclusions & Community
- Credits
Overview
Broken link building is a link building tactic where a marketer contacts a webmaster who has a broken link on his/her site and recommends one or more alternatives that include his/her target site. For the purposes of this piece, we will use a pediatrician in Raleigh, NC as an example client.
Prospecting
The first step in any Broken link building campaign is to find relevant dead pages. However, there are different methods of prospecting depending upon the broken link building strategy you are employing. There are essentially three types of broken link building strategies:
- Resource Page Targeting with Keywords
- Resource Page Targeting with URLs
- Direct URL Targeting
We will cover each of these in the prospecting section. I will mention multiple tools throughout this post and will give descriptions of all of them at the end. Keyword Based
Keyword based is the the most common and, in my opinion, straightforward method of broken link building. The method involves searching Google for keywords relevant to your site's interests, finding resource pages that link to content related to your keywords, extracting all the links from those resource pages, finding missing pages among those links, and finally qualifying those opportunities.
Select Prospecting Keywords Like so many things in SEO, we begin with keyword selection. A successful broken link building campaign lives and dies by the keywords used. There are a couple of characteristics we want to look for in an ideal keyword.
- Categorically relevant: This characteristic seems obvious. The prospecting keywords need to be relevant. However, they don't necessarily have to be relevant to your product like the key phrase "health resources." The keywords could be relevant to your audience "resources for kids" or your geography "Raleigh resources." Remember, you are finding resource pages with these keywords, you are not finding the final targets. You want to cast a wide net, which leads to...
- Generally broad: This is where most campaigns fail. Our mock client is unlikely to find any resource pages for the keyword "raleigh nc pediatrician resources," much less any with good link opportunities. You should choose key phrases that you would consider to be categories that your company might fall in, rather than the specific term.
Prospecting Phrases: Once you have identified your keywords, you will want to pair them with prospecting phrases. These are searches to use in Google or Bing to find relevant resource and links pages like "intitle:resources" or "inurl:links." Below is a list of prospecting phrases you can use to help find relevant linking pages.
Search Results Scraping: You now have the arduous task of finding all the results for all these prospecting phrases. Google is not fond of sending in automated requests, so you have a couple of choices. You complete the task by hand and use the MozBar to extract results, you can use a SERP scraping tool and risk Google's ire, or you could look into use the Bing API, which would necessitate changing many of the search operators in the above list of prospecting phrases. Ultimately, you will want to pull down the top 100 results for each of the prospecting phrases you use. You will have quite a bit of crossover, so you will want to de-dupe those lists. You can use Virante's free "Duplicate Deleter" tool to accomplish this, or you can simply use Excel's remove duplicates function.
Link Extraction: Once you have a culled list of potential "linking pages," you need to extract every external link from these pages and begin the process of finding all the 404s. You can also combine this step with the 404 header check using a tool like Domain Hunter+or Check My Links.
Link extraction and 404 header check
404 / Error Checking: Once you have extracted all the links, you will have to check the headers on each link to determine whether or not they are 404s, our ultimate target. If you used Domain Hunter Plus or Check My Links, you can skip this process. The easiest way to do this is with a simple HTTP Status Code checker. There is a free bulk tool here. Just copy and paste all your URLs here, without the https:// and it will find all the 404s for you.
Opportunity Qualification: There are two things you will want to determine about each potential opportunity to vet them for quality: relevance and backlinks.
- Backlink acquisition: Once you have found a set of 404 pages, you now have to filter them to determine which are actually strong targets. The more backlinks pointing to a 404 page, the more opportunities you have for link replacement. These linking domains will be the sites you contact to replace the broken link with your own. There are several ways to do this, but the easiest at the moment is likely Majestic SEO's bulk backlink checker. Remember, at this point you are trying just to get an idea of those with the most links and ignore those with very few. This will limit the amount of time you have on checking relevance.
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Relevance analysis: Now you filtered your list of 404 opportunities to those with a good number of unique linking domains. Let's say that number is 50 or more. You now have to determine the relevancy of that content. You can do that a few ways:
- Visit the Wayback Machine (also known as the way back machine) to find cached copies of the URL in history. If the page is well linked and did not block web crawlers, you should be able to find the content here.
- If this is not available, you can look at the anchor text of the links pointing to the page. You can use SEOMoz Open Site Explorer to get an export of the anchor text.
- You can look at the URL itself for hints as to how relevant the content would be.
- You can visit the linking pages to see if those links have descriptions of what the previous content was.
Prospecting Shortcuts: There are two tools that you could use to jump over a lot of these steps.
- Broken Link Builder (brokenlinkbuilding.com): This tool by CitationLabs is not free, but allows you to perform all of the actions above in an automated fashion. Just type in your kewords and it performs all of the steps above, from finding opportunities to qualifying them based on links and relevance. This is by far the most robust broken link building tool currently available and a huge time saver.
Resource Page Targeting w/ Model URL
Unlike using keywords, this method starts with a known site and mines their backlinks to relevant resource pages that, in turn, produce broken link building opportunities.
Site / URL Selection: This is by far the most important part of the process. Choosing the right site will make or break this strategy. I do want to give a nod to Garrett French for pointing this method out to me a few months ago. There are a couple of factors you want to use in identifying the perfect site or URL.
- Non-commercial: In most cases, you want a non-commercial source. If the site has a direct incentive to acquire links, chances are there will be too much manipulated link noise in their backlink profile to properly mine them for broken link building opportunities.
- Authoritative: If the site is not authoritative, it likely has attracted few links from resources that aggregate important links on the web. These are the resource pages from which we will find 404 opportunities. If they aren't linking to your selected URL, you are wasting your time.
- Relevant: Obviously, the site needs to be relevant to your industry. You can use this technique to find great opportunities based on nasa.gov, but unless you are SpaceX, you probably have no business doing so.
Backlink Acquisition: Following the example above of a Raleigh, NC dentist, let's assume that we selected the American Dental Association (ADA.org). Using Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, or A Hrefs, export all of the links pointing back to this site. This list of URLs should be treated in the same way as the list of URLs in the keyword method that were pulled from searching Google with prospecting phrases. You can now skip to the Link Extraction section in the previous description and follow from there. The steps are identical, no need to repeat them.
This is the least scalable of the strategies and is used specifically to target a single link prospect. Unlike the previous two methods where you are trying to find potential broken content to replace and your link prospects are those who link to that broken content, in this method you have already chosen your link prospect and you simply want to find broken links on his/her site as an excuse to start a conversation. I hesitate to include this strategy because it is weak and unscalable, but it is a part of the grouping of strategies known as "broken link building" so I will include it.
Let's assume that you are the Raleigh, NC dentist and you have decided that all you really want is a link from ADA.org. You feel that you have some great content they would link to if only you had a reason to open up a conversation that didn't sound completely like begging. Well, the first step is to try and find a broken link on their site so you have a reason to reach out to their webmaster.
Site Crawling: Site crawling can be problematic because you must balance your need for relatively quick responses and a general respect for the site owner's bandwidth and uptime. Do not turn on a crawler that you are not certain follows polite crawling policies and obeys robots.txt. Your best bet would be one of the following:
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Xenu Link Sleuth
A classic SEO tool, Xenu Link Sleuth makes it easy to spider a site and find broken links among other problems. -
Screaming Frog SEO
Quickly becoming the spider of choice for many SEOs, Screaming Frog can quickly spider your site to diagnose everything from duplicate content to 404s. -
Deep Trawl
Often overlooked, Deep Trawl is a worthy adversary for solving on-site issues.
Opportunity Selection: You now have a list of broken links on your ideal linking website. Identifying the best opportunity will greatly increase the likelihood of succeeding with this strategy. Here are a couple of pointers.
- Choose a broken link opportunity where the link is external. This does two things: it makes the webmaster feel like it is not his/her fault unlike an internal link and it creates a 1:1 ratio of removing an external link and hopefully adding your external link. A webmaster is far more likely to replace a broken external link with another external link than to replace an internal link with an external one.
- Try and choose a broken link on the same page as the one your link would most fit. This is most likely to occur if your ideal linking site has a resources section.
The next step in the broken link building process is creating content that matches or improves upon the broken page. The first step you will need to take is actually determining what the broken page is. We assume that you have already vetted this page for relevance so you should have a general idea, but getting as specific as possible will help you create content that meets the expectations of all of those who previously linked to the now defunct resource. There are two tools that can help with this right off the bat...
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Wayback Machine: The Wayback Machine at Archive.org allows you to see much of the web as it existed in history. This is your first and best bet for finding the content. Pro-tip: Use Majestic SEO's historical index to find when the links were acquired, and then choose the date in Archive.org that corresponds with this date. This will help you know the mindset of the linkers if the content changed over time -
Warrick: Warrick is a little known tool by the Comp Sci department at Old Dominion that helps you rebuild an entire website by searching through public proxies/mirror caches to find copies of lost content. This is particularly good for rebuilding content that was blocQked by robots.txt. Unfortunately, Warrick is a perl program that may be difficult to operate.
Raised Expectations: Chances are the site for which you are replacing content has greater authority in the industry than does yours. Chances are it is less commercial, more informative, and more trustworthy in general. If you want to acquire a decent return on investment, you need to focus intently on content quality.
- Expect to improve upon the content that was created.
- Update relevant statistics.
- Add new citations and sections.
- Consider reaching out to the original author for more information to add credibility.
So, you have found your opportunity, created your list of link opportunities, and you are ready to start outreach. Here is how to make the most out of that link list you have.
Contact Finding: There are a growing number of resources for automating the process of contact discovery, although each comes with it's own set of issues.
- Link Research Tools Contact Finder
- SEOGadget's Contact Finder
- Raven Tools Contact Finder
- BuzzStream
- Virante's Contact Finder: In Beta
Email Templates: There are many strategies you can employ in the outreach, here are a few of them depending on how transparent you want to be. We find, in general, that if you write good enough content you can be very transparent.
- Act as a user who happened upon the broken link
- Mix your link in with other valuable, related links
- Offer the replacement in a follow up email
Email Templates: Below is an example of a broken link building outreach email. The most important part of the outreach process is that you should tailor your outreach at least to the specific campaign and industry if not to each target specifically. If you can add even a sentence of plausible, relevant customization to each email you send out you will greatly increase your conversion. I promise you if you copy and paste this template you will waste a lot of your opportunities, no matter how good it is.
Anthony Nelson has some fantastic templates here from his excellent piece "Broken Link Building Guide from Noob to Novice".
Like nearly any link building technique, sweat equity is ultimately going to make the difference between a successful campaign and a failure. The devil is always in the details. With that, I would like to see that this becomes a living document. Broken link building, while not a new technique, is becoming more and more scalable. As more agencies, consultants and business owners jump on the bandwagon, their voices need to be heard as well. Subsequently, I am requesting that if you know any tips or tricks that you feel free to include them in the comments here. Thanks, and happy broken link building!
While I would like to pretend that most of my knowledge came from divine inspiration or on-the-job learning, the truth is that many thought leaders have chimed in on broken link building. This posting can be attributed in part to conversations with or content provided by the following great SEOs:
Jon Cooper
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Garrett French
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Anthony Nelson
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Matt Zaffina
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Paddy Moogan
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Your guide is so comprehensive that I have no questions anymore!
Love that blog post - especially the prospecting phrases, the tools and the outreach mail.
Bookmarked!
Not a real comment... but I suggest you to change your avatar today into a Russ Santa Klaus Jones one. Christmas has come in anticipation with your post, Russ.
Awww shucks. Hopefully thousands of webmasters wake up Christmas Mornings with link broken emails in their inboxes.
This is great Russ!
I've had pretty good success doing BLB. It's been mentioned a couple of times now, and I would like to restate that this technique is only going to work if you are producing things that greatly improve the web.
I was mentioning BLB to a friend of mine who runs a large authoritative website. He told me he was not a fan of BLB because he often gets people pestering him with BLB requests. In most cases, the linkbuilder has located a broken link and suggests that the webmaster replaces that link with a link to his site. But, what my friend found was that the recommended replacement was sub par.
I recently did some BLB where I stumbled upon a resource that was often linked to but no longer existed. The previous content of the website was not available. So, what I did was spend several days creating an awesome resource page. I interviewed people to get fresh information about the subject. I got original photos that were helpful to the reader. I curated a list of links and added that to my article. I embedded youtube videos related to the resource. It took a LONG time to put this article together.
Next, I contacted every webmaster who linked to the now nonexistent resource and told them it no longer existed. My tactic when writing BLB emails is to not be manipulative at all. (I hate it when I think an SEO is buttering me up so they can get a link from me.) Instead, I told them straight up that I would love for them to link to my site if they felt it was a good fit for them. I like using this phrase, "Would I be able to be so bold as to ask you to link to my site?"
The result? I got several great backlinks. Plus, our site now gets a lot of traffic for people searching for this resource. We rank #1 for several keywords related to this resource. As it is a resource about a yearly event, it should continue to attract traffic and links each year.
BLB takes a lot of work to do right, but it's a way to attract links that is penalty-proof. Google wants sites to get links because the links are merited. And the only way to do that is to create awesome stuff.
Exactly. The trick is creating an awesome replacement.
Now that it's posted here with a full How-To, i hope that the guest post incidents won't re-occur.What happened with guest posts was that thousands of SEO's started exploiting it and Google will eventually de-value it.Let's hope our community can maintain this as a white hat and unique method for gaining links.
Well, doesn't look like I need to write another post or speak another word about how to do broken link building. I can now just link to this.
But thanks a ton for the mention at the bottom! And will be testing that email template to see how it measures up against a few of mine :)
Jon, care to share a couple of your templates...?
I love this post - however (as with all quality link building/earning) I wonder what the time costs are of the process? I.e is it scalable for smaller businesses with less resource?
Thanks :) Charlotte
Good question. It is hard to scale without the use of tools but garretts tool does all the prospecting for you, making it easy to find opportunities
Great post here Russ,
I've found that the most effective outreach e-mail for this is a simple one line e-mail:
Hey "Name of Webmaster,"
I noticed there was a broken link on this page "link to page." Just wanted to let you know. Love your site!
Thanks,
"Your Name"
After that, follow up with your request.
Also, there is a certain not-to-be-mentioned tool that can do 90% of this work. All I'm going to say is that it's mentioned in this post:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-garbage-ranks-in-the-serps-a-case-study
What a brilliant guide. We send out about 4 different emails (varied templates) and then follow up with 2-3 phone calls to the prospect if it makes sense to do so. We've often found that phone outreach works much better than email when contacting government or municipal websites, boards of trades etc.
Hey Dev,
I've heard good things about getting on the phone for BLB but have always wondered about the mechanics of making it happen... How have you executed phone campaigns for link building?
Garrett
Yeah Dev, like to know too.
Spectacular post Russ. Will be going through this in some detail over the coming weeks. This is bound to be another classic moz post.
Great article with some very usefull tactics and tools.
This is what makes SeoMoz so great.
thnx alot
kind regards
Jarno
Russ great post but what is your opinion on the time spent on this plus the success one may get in getting the said people to link back to you.
My practical reasoning is that a majority of the people would either ignore the mail, else correct the problem and thank you but there would only be a few percentage who link back to you.
I believe that you may have done this process yourself, so if you could shed any light on how successful is this strategy as compared to other brand building activities?
Great question. This is where the "your success is equal to the amount of good you do for the web" comes into play.
When selecting a BLB opportunity, you should be very careful to make sure that you consider the "vital" nature of the opportunity. Normally, the number of links a page receives is a fair approximation of that value, but sometimes the number of links really just indicates the viral nature of the piece.
For example, one common method of doing broken link building is to find all of the old "Best of 2011" posts (or different years), and simply update them and try to get previous linkers to switch out to the new version. However, this method tends to struggle because while those pieces may have been link worthy at the time, they were likely not vital to the linking website. On the contrary, a tutorial for setting up Adobe Acrobat is probably still very useful, and in fact vital to many sites that deliver content via PDF.
Another quick tip is to leverage the competitive spirit. Let's say you are have replaced an old article on setting up Adobe Acrobat and found links from a group of competing sites (maybe ecommerce sites). Once one of them has successfully updated the link, go back to the others and say "I was able to find the correct link on .... (competitor's site)". This will make them update it really fast.
"vital to the linking website."
I think that's the crux of the whole idea. Some site owners might not really care about a few broken outbound links because, hey, what's it really matter to them, right? But if you can make a case for how vital that broken link is for them or their visitors then you have a much better chance of getting the site owner to take action
Hi Davis,
I've been a practitioner of BLB for a little over a year now (40 links a month for a client) and can say it definitely works.
That said, it rarely works sales page links in my experience. It can work, but not with justifiable reliability.
The important thing here, as Russ mentioned - is improving the web. In this case, improving their links/resources page with your own informational content. If your content is good, you will get links!
I agree, we've seen the most success when the links are going to tutorials that have been moved/updated to new pages. The site owners really care about their visitors and want to get them the best, most updated content.
Agree with you Garrett, as SEO's we also have a primary duty to make a the web a better place for quality and useful information.
In most cases, it seems best just to 301 redirect the 404 page on the client site to the most updated page. We resort to broken linkbuilding when the client can't 301 their pages due to CMS issues, personnel availability, etc.
Awesome post! Especially thanks for Prospecting Phrases list (I have a huge one compiled by myself, but here I found some part that I haven't)...
Also I can recommend nice tool to find (and overall inspect) broken links called "Link Exam" - as for me it's much more user-friendly in comparison with Xenu or Screaming Frog...
Have a nice day there!)
Thanks! Ill check it out.
Somehow you made the mistake of including my picture in a section labeled 'Great SEOs.'
Fantastic. This will do very nicely. I've seen some bits and pieces for broken link building, but what you've given us a great guide on how to action it!
Ill try to answer questions here all day. Happy Monday!
I love this post, nice work. Sorry if this is completely unrelated but I can't help but look at your profile pic without thinking of First Time Internet Kid.
https://i.qkme.me/36b2kf.jpg
I GOT ON SEOMOZ, NOW IM RICH
Russvirante, What do you think about one of the tools like Majestic or Ahref coming out with a solution where they tell you the number of links which are already broken. That will reduce a lot of efforts required or even take it to the next step of fetching the contact details and allowing you to send personalized emails to those people ... Worth a few hundred $ a month subscription ;-) which easily a few thousand people will buy !!
The problem is this - it is easy to find 404s, it is a little harder to find 404s with lots of links, and it is very hard to find 404s with lots of links that are relevant.
The brokenlinkindex.com tries to solve part 1 and 3 of that statement. It has tons of 404s which, I believe, it scraped from the common crawl dataset. Relevant in that dataset largely comes from the keyword being in the URL. However, it doesn't have link data (although they make finding it quite accessible).
The Majestic or Ahrefs approach could work at parts 1 and 2, but relevance is still limited to keywords in the url or, perhaps, keywords in the anchor text to the page.
Right now, it appears that prospecting methods are here to stay, and the automated approach at brokenlinkbuilding.com, which finds prospects, vets them for relevance by looking at both anchor text and the archive.org content (using nTopic to determine content relevancy scores) and, finally, grabbing all the link data, is the strongest bet. My guess is Garrett will tie it into a contact finder soon enough (since he already has one) and it will be almost a complete solution.
amazing resource here, thanks for you time and care putting this all together so well!
Any writer that takes the time to research a subject as thoroughly as you have deserves to be commended. This article is appealing and very well-written. The first two sentences encouraged me to read more. thanks man.
Fantastic post!
It's not a method of backlinking I've explored too much in the past but I'll certainly investigate further after reading this!
If there was one paid tool that you find essential to the process what would it be? I've heard many before say Screaming Frog but I'm curious as to what you think?
Would you say that you save enough time to make the paid tools worth their money?
The paid tools are definitely worth it, although there is only one that really does everything (brokenlinkbuilding.com)
Fantastic post! Thanks for the tool tips on Warrick and brokenlinkindex.com.
Thank you thank you thank you!! I've been looking for a guide to broken link building for some time and finally I've found one that goes above and beyond the basics. In regards to the pitch email, do you find it better to pose as a persona, or as the webmaster?
persona, definitely.
Really great question Renee and of course great guide Russ.
This is a great piece! Thanks for putting this all together, especially the links to some of the tools such as Warrick.
Excellent guide, and like others, I have no questions! It was very helpful to be taken from point A to B with everything laid out, including tools. Thanks so much for taking the time to put this together. It's extremely useful.
Holy blubber nuggets! What an awesome resource! Thanks for sharing!
Hi!
Great article. Quick inquiry though; none of the tools on either of the following domains appear to work properly. I've tested several domains and several combinations of keywords and receive no results every time. Any insight onto why this may be? Or any other sites with similar tools that may have a higher chance of operating accurately on a more frequent basis?
So you have tried Garrett French's brokenlinkbuilding.com? It hasnt failed me yet.
Works great for me. :)
Russ First of all thanks to you for great articles. In online marketing there are lot's of tools are available but Garrett french tools is really awesome and it works.
Recently I've used this method. I pretty much followed what you have here to a T. In the last couple weeks I sent 20 requests, using a very similiar outreach email template. The content I promoted was almost exactly what was originally in the now-404'd page (thanks to archive.org).
I have gotten zero responses.
Granted, some of the links were pretty old, and figured that may have something to do with it. Maybe the webmaster doesn't care about old links on their site?
My question - what is a realistic conversion rate for this tactic? Should I be discouraged? What other types of metrics should I use to determine who's worth my time?
Hey Chris,
I would try a shorter outreach template. Similar to what David had suggested. I have been reaching out to webmaster's and posing a simple question to increase the likelihood of a response.
Most people are inclined to answer an initial e-mail sent to them from someone they do not know if they do not have to invest much into the response.
i.e. Ask who the webmaster of the site is, even if you already know that they are the sole owner of the site.
A person who is already invested in a conversation is exponentially more likely to take an action on the second e-mail, where you inform them of the possible substitutes for their broken link.
Those are some good tips.
I've been chatting with a few since my first comment on this post. Sounds like an expected conversion rate is about 1% for this tactic. Would you agree with that?
Speaking with some who don't think this works at all, and is good in theory but not worth the time. Since I'm just getting into it, I'd love to get some validation.
This is the question that validates the whole thing for me, and determines whether it's fluffy blogging or a real viable tactic. I hope someone answers.
Hi Chris,
2% is what I hope for, 1% is probably more typical. That said, I'm doing large scale outreach with a template. I think rates would improve if we really worked at 1-1 relationship building.
When I first started learning about BLB - from Melanie Nathan and Napoleon Suarez - I think both of them targeted only the top linking pages they wanted links from. And they spent quite a bit of time on each email. I think this approach can work too but it's not been what I've specialized in thus far.
To sort of answer your first question - if I'd sent 200 outreach and gotten no links/responses then I would think there was something wrong. At least in the way I do broken link building.
Garrett
Fantastic work here Russ.
I've long been a fan of broken link building, not just because of the success you can have with it, but also because it's nice to be able to clean up a bit of the link rot around the web.
I wrote a post not so long ago about a few techniques I had been trying out. Would love to get your thoughts: https://www.andrewisidoro.co.uk/blog/seo-guide-to-broken-link-building/
Will have to update my original post to include this, and to add in Warrick as a tool. Completely new to me but it looks very useful.
Dude this is great! I wish I could edit my post and add it in. The site-up checking idea is brilliant.
Hello Russ!
Excellent amplification!
I would like to say that its really crucial strategy of link building but, very small amount of percentage of success actually we had through this technique.
We enjoyed entire post and appreciate your effort. Thanks for sharing!
I love the article, but what about log files? There's no more thorough way to find busted links. I know it takes some learning, but we've found some pure-gold stuff this way.
Agreed, but getting log files of other websites?
Was just lead here from your recent post: Broken Link Building Bible: The New Testament. Very comprehensive guide and a strategy I had never considered. Thank you for sharing!
Put Some more Light on broken link building for us beginners :)
Hey Russ,
What would you recommend we test extracted links for deadlink opportunities with?
Or do you do this one by one with a chrome extension such as Domain Hunter Plus. As I've got 600 extracted search results so I don't really want to open 600 tabs in Chrome!
Sam
Edit: I found the solution I was looking for! Automates searching for pages (by keyword) and checking if those pages have any broken links. I can even export the findings to filter on. Streamlined the process to no end!
Awesome post, Russ! Thanks for sharing the golden rules of broken link building!
Are there any free tools for searching for contacts and checking the backlinks of the 404 pages?
That is very effective technique these days but difficult thing is here find broken links from other website ...can you please tell me step by step how i can do this ?
Russ, thank you for your great documentation.
This is my first post at Moz, but not last. I have carefully read all words in the bible and I have no any question now (there is may be after).However, I wish this small idea about email template represents the point of "Why should you (site owner) fix broken links?" will not waste your time. :)
From the point, I will insert some statistical information into unsolicited email that will represent opportunity and experience outage to site owner.
Please note: This method will use for the web that fit for your site.
Hello Russ,
Thanks for sharing this very informative article. Broken link building is really effective. I’m doing it right now for my SEO. It’s kind of slow but I am outsourcing to make it a little faster. It’s not risky compared to other fast techniques that are not good in the eyes of Google.
The tool you mention at https://brokenlinkindex.com does not work. I wrote them and told them that, but they ignored me.
amzing piece of article Russ
Very helpful knowledge..
So which is better -- to replace the missing content on their site and link to your own site from that content (much like a guest post) or to create the missing link content on your own site and get them to link back to it instead of their broken link?
I'm new to BLB and this has been an invaluable resource -- thank you!
Amazing piece, thank you and this is how it should be done! However, people usually go to the dark side and end up checking if the domains have expired on those broken links. They then up buy the domain/s to use as a link back to their target site. Everything seems sweet until the penalties kick in!
In case of Screaming Frog - can you elaborate how to find the internal broken links?
That's completest guide I ever seen! Thanks
Amazing post Brian, in my opinion broken link building is a best example of earned links rather than link building. It takes time to get one single earned link but its value is equals to 100 links simple backlinks. One must add this in strategy inorder to gain quality.
Again big thanks for this valuable information, Keep Posting!
Awesome blog post for learning how to do "white seo" backlink for better lis for seach engine rank
It's important to mention that the success rate can be low and this could be not the right tactic for everyone. If you've got the time/resources it's still a good choice for an SEO committed to running a certain kind of campaign-
Thanks a'lot great post
Niceee. Thanks!
Hi,
The following urls are not working for extracting the urls. It will be really helpful if the following urls get replaced:
iwebtool.com
code.google.com
Thanks
Shouvik Mazumder
email:[email protected]
This article is well explained, thank you very much for the information, it is one of the most relevant that I could find
Great just came while i heard of broken link building technique..
Very neatly explained ..
Thanks
Pulkit Thakur..
I agree with Davis. If they can correct the problem using the fixed link, they might be reluctant to link back to you. Especially when the original content is not too outdated.
However, all of your effort are not necessarily wasted; as BLB is also a great tactic in developing SEO relationships. When you point out issues with their site and offer solutions, you present yourself as resourceful and dedicated. It's a good way to initiate relationship. Furthermore, if the content of your link is high quality; although they did not link to you in the first time, they would be more likely to share your content the next time you reach out to them.
Anyway, thank you very much for a great post Russ! Keep it up!
Trang Lam from Powered by Search
I have read through this article and just letting it sort of sink in. I am wondering how much of the process is cut down if I am using Ahrefs. Also if I am using some more aggressive tactics like email outreach coupled with cold calling does this make it easier to get more backlinks?
This is definetly a page I will be looking to often, BOOKMARKED! Thanks Russ.
Undoubtedly the best resource on Broken Link Building.
Gret work, Rus!
Just wanted to let you know I featured this article in this massive 8k words guide on eCommerce link building . Would be cool if you have the time to check it out. Check out "14. Find broken links" seciton.
Keep up the great work!
Hi,
I do believe that one should always care for the broken link. Because, lots of broken link will affect site and its search appearance as well.
Yes, indeed this is a quality article for sure it will make webmasters to give time for checking broken links as well.
Thanks
sunil k
What is the great post! Thank you so much. It really useful for me.
But, guys, are you serious? I see you have a broken link!!! Not really broken but it's wrong =) For links extraction you give us as an example some services - iwebtool.com and code.google.com, but both of they links to iwebtool.com!
Anyway, thanks for you job!
This technique never have imagined. It's great. Congratulations on this extraordinary guide. Add markers
I am doing SEO since 2008 but this is the most tough strategy for me find a broken link website and less chances for their reply. That's why sometimes I have to quit on SEO but trying my best to help my clients because this is the only source of income i got.
Hi Russ, still love this piece. Found a broken link and a duplicated one (301 of the other) with the link extraction tools. Got any suggestions that can replace these? Any that allow you to enter multiple URL's at ones?
I tried this before, but did not get many responses. Maybe I have to try with a different email copy. What did work for me, was to do it locally. I went thru last year's local phonebook (yes, that thing with the yellow sheets of paper), and started going to the websites on the ads. You have no idea how many 404's I found. So I went straight to their shops/offices, and offered to help. So, I managed to get several backlinks, and some new business in the process.
This is really helpful post thanks
This is really great post, one of best which I read ever, I found one mistake in link from Contact Finding section, (https://tools.citationlabs.com/gate.way) 500 - Internal server error.
Please update the correct link
Simply marvelous..thnx for adding something new to my knowledge base...the links are good addition...to this detailed information
Interesting concept.
I like when people think outside of the box. Will definitely give this broken link method a go.
Great post! I've been doing BLB since the BrokenLinkBuilding.com tool was launched.
One other protip - You might be able to contact the ISP of the missing content and "acquire" the now-broken URL by getting it 301'd to your own. Maybe you don't need to contact 500 webmasters...
Thank you sir Russvirante for such an informative post! The part which i like the most are the tools you have mentioned there! Those could be really helpful for those newbies and experts!
Hello @russvirante
I just read your entire post and when i check this entire page with "Check my Links" Google Chrome Extension i found one broken Link on "CitationLabs Contact Finder" it is an 500 error. I think it's a funny thing which i am doing, but i loves to do funny things..
Hello Russ,
You have just shared great tactics for link building. But Here I have question regarding same.
1. Is webmasters become just ready easily by sending them email about their website Broken link sources to them?
2. If they ready to be linked you would it be safe for your website? Because if they just simply ready for linking your website means they don't care about relevancy or not maintain their platform with high quality links.
And If all is well but what about page/links factors? if they just put your links in inner pages where number of links are more than 100 or at page where they just targeting Google Advertisements by putting advertisement link on keywords for gaining more and more revenue?
This was a great post. Russ what are your thoughts on scaling broken link building with something like Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
We have had some hit or miss with mturk in the past. I would spend some time over at turkernation talking to folks there to get their opinions.
Great post, Russ. Fantastic to have the key info compiled into a single post - have emailed around the office! Thanks for sharing.
Cheers,
Mark
Awesome article. This is definitely the most comprehensive broken-link resource I've come across.
Hey man great method. I've been doing the same thing for years but my restoration tool is much more advanced than warrick with a gui and everything. I'd love to have a private discussion with you about it.
One thing I'd like to mention is there is a much easier way to find broken link targets. Well, it's not exactly that easy but I think it's easier than what you currently do. Anyways if you are interested please contact me :)
Why not sharing the info with the community? :)
Great list man.
Amazing post.
Russ, again great post. I've spent a little bit of time trying to really refine my blb process & your post was great help. One step I think would be helpful would be to run the broken link through OSE. It makes sense that, using the raleigh dentist example, if the ADA linked to something then other webmaster who may not have been on your list did too. At least it makes sense to me. While you would get more websites to search for contact info & more e-mails to send, these are still viable options & there are ways to scale up the really time consuming parts of that process. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Nice Article ! I would like to know more on broken link building. As a beginner iam hearing for the first time. Normally i heard of link building were we submit articles, press release and more. How to start up with a broken link optimization.
Very Informative posts, can anyone tell what is the exact method to check competitors website back-links.
Nice post, I found answer my question. Thanks for useful information
Thanks for sharing this run-down of the "broken link building" process. We haven't tried the method ourselves yet, but have been heaing great things about it from others. It looks like it can be beneficial and you are helping webmasters as well. Will have to bookmark this guide for when we start using it ourselves.
Awesome post Russ! Just a note that code.google.com is going to the wrong hyperlink, is this the tool you are referring to??https://code.google.com/p/websitelinkextractor/
Cheers,
Isaac
Thanks for the post, I fear to do all. Really fearing. Being sleepless when thinking about link building. I like links more than Google likes. Going partially visible is better than invisible.
Nice article, valuable tips to follow.
*raises hand*
In big school of SEO, I'm probably in the 3rd or 4th grade, so pardon me if this is a silly question but - couldn't someone just use Raven sitefinder or some other tool that finds sites linking to your search terms, then feed them a link scraper and go into all the other steps?
That first batch of steps seems pretty tedious and avoidable. Am I just mixed up?
What an awesome post Russ.
So many things to digest, I think the most difficult part is the first one, to target websites which have broken links. This requires much experience in finding relevent sources.
Russ,
This is no doubt a great post. I personally tried it for one of our clients and we were able to get a few awesome links. Though, it was very tough doing it that time but after reading your blog, I believe it should be much easier.
Thanks mate. Great job.
Thanks for this Russ,
I just attended a conference where the benefits of broken link building were emphasised repeatedly so looking forward to working through your step by step guide here.
Cheers
This is one of those great posts that shows up in your RSS feed and you skim over the first time knowing that it will take a quiet weekend someday to really dive into. I'm looking forward to digging in a little deeper over the holidays.
Clever. Though, I wonder if the time spent will outweigh writing great content on ones own site. I'll give it a test though and see what happens. M.
This a great post, I am sure I will be coming back to this one time and time again. Good Stuff.
Thanks for post russ!