What Is Broken Link Building and How To Do It Properly?

An effective and powerful link-building tactic helps you get quality & relevant backlinks from other websites to yours. However, there’s no denying that a successful link-building strategy must carefully balance several practices to get excellent links consistently. A proven approach to incorporate into your link-building strategy is broken link building. 

In this blog, we will tell you about Broken Links and walk you through a step-by-step implementation process on your website. 

What is a Broken Link?

A broken link is a link on a website that no longer leads to its intended content. Instead, you get one of those significant, nasty 404 Errors.

A broken link can happen in many ways. For instance, the site may have made a mistake linking to external content, or the linked site may have removed the page in question. 

The big problem with this is that broken links spoil the user experience for anyone browsing your site. In addition, too many broken links can even affect the SEO of the linking page.

What is Broken Link Building?

Broken Link Building is a technique based on finding “broken or failure links” on websites and contacting webmasters to get a backlink from the identified broken link. In this context, a broken link refers to a non-existing website URL.

SEO professionals mainly use this approach to build more backlinks with little effort. Also, it is a “white hat” practice, allowing for easier adoption by customers and not risking sanctions from Google.

After detecting broken links and Broken Link Building, now let us know why broken links occur on a website. 

Reasons behind Broken Links on your website

Broken links can occur for various reasons. Some of them are as follows – 

  • The target site removed the linked webpage, which is known as a 404 Error.
  • The URL of the page receiving the link has changed.
  • A firewall or login is blocking access to the target site destination.
  • The binding was never correctly implemented.
  • You have moved a webpage without adding a redirect.
  • The target site has been permanently moved or no longer exists.
  • The site owner entered the wrong URL, maybe misspelled or mistyped.

Before moving forward, we must understand why broken link building is essential for SEO. So let’s have a look at its importance. 

Why “Broken Link Building” is Important

The importance of Broken Link Building is as follows –

  • Broken Link Building can potentially increase your conversion rate by 5-10%.
  • It complements other link-building tactics as opportunities arise.
  • You can earn lots of high-quality backlinks to your website with Broken Link Building.
  • Broken link building improves the relevance of your website by providing quality content.
  • It creates links on pages that have already inherited authority.
  • This practice establishes links from relevant content that aid landing page visibility and growth.
  • Broken Link Building gives you access to new audiences you haven’t discovered yet. 
  • It inherits links previously pointed to competitors and uses this authority to drive your SEO strategy. 
  • The high-quality backlinks you earn will increase your website’s visibility.

Finally comes the significant and crucial part of our blog; how to implement broken link building on your website to make it worthwhile for you and the users. 

Here is a step-by-step guide to making you comprehend the process of implementation of broken link building. 

Step-by-step Guide to Implement Broken Link Building

Step #1 – Prospecting broken links 

The first step for Broken Link building is to look for broken links. Prospecting involves finding a broken page with links pointing to it. A broken page generates a 404 Error when you type the address into your browser. An example of a broken link is a hyperlink that redirects you to a “404 not found” page or something similar.

Next, use SEO link-building tools to find the pages that link to a 404 page. Finally, you can use more advanced SEO link-building and prospecting tools like Ahrefs and Moz.

Prospecting involves various techniques. Let’s have a look at a few of them. 

  • Resource Pages 

Resource pages and resource sections of web pages can be the origin of broken links. Therefore, it is better to use link analysis tools to find these resource pages. For example, review the list of hyperlinks and test them to see if they are broken and find the links to them.

  • Simple Prospecting 

This approach involves reviewing blogs and posts on relevant websites and finding broken links described above. It then communicates and provides a link to your page with similar content. It is a slow process, but you can still get results.

  • Keyword-Based Prospecting

This step is the easiest approach to building broken links. It’s also the easiest way to check for broken links. Begin by selecting relevant keywords for your website. Then use these keywords in your backlink strategies. With this approach, choose keywords pertinent to your audience but not necessarily your products.

Step #2 – Create Relevant Content 

The content you provide must match the content linked above. It doesn’t have to 100% match the original page. But if you can offer better and more up-to-date content, show your niche expertise and thought leadership in your niche. Remember, you don’t want to blindly email the web admins of the sites linking to the page.

If you don’t know what the page is about, your chances of getting backlinks decrease, especially if your content isn’t relevant to the original. However, if you have a blog post or article that is somewhat similar, you can update it to match the content you are targeting. 

This step is part of a content reuse strategy. You can use tools like Ahrefs to view the dead URL content.

Step #3 – Send Link Building Outreach Emails 

After identifying broken links and posting relevant content, reach out to the site owner with a compelling email. You should point out dead links in your email and provide details about them. For example, you can share what kind of error you found, if the website still exists or if there are any misspelled in the URL. 

Also, don’t forget to request a strategic link. Demonstrate your credibility by providing a synopsis of the original content. Attach a screenshot of where you found the broken link.

Step #4 – Follow Up to Enhance Success 

Building broken links is not a foolproof strategy; your success rates will sometimes vary. To leverage your success, remember to send a follow-up email to those who don’t reply after a week or two.

Additionally, you can enhance your offer by offering to link to your site in one of your campaigns or any other method of improving your SEO.

Here’s the solution

Building broken links is a great way to create relevant links to your content, using sites your competitors have removed. It’s also a great way to clean up the internet! Nobody likes to click on a link that lands on a dead page. You can think of your efforts as helping others in hopes of getting a great link.

A broken link-building service agency will help you use tools and apply broken link-building strategies to boost your website’s rank. Digi Marketing Tech is an experienced broken link-building service provider and offers other digital marketing services, serving businesses of all sizes. 

We use all the tools and techniques at our disposal to build our client’s backlink profile. Benefit from our experience and improve your SEO results today. Visit our website for more information. 

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