What the heck is broken link building?
Some of our recent clients have been asking us so we thought we’d write a handy beginners guide to broken link building.
This guide will discuss broken link building, how it works, and give you some pro tips on how broken link building can help your website rank higher in search engines like Google!
Broken link building is a technique that many SEOs use to help improve their search engine rankings, by identifying relevant broken links on web pages and then asking to fix them. This technique works by finding broken or ‘dead’ links on websites and then creating a relevant resource such as an infographic, white paper, or a new relevant website page on your own site to link to.
Examples of Broken Links
When you see errors like these, you know you’ve clicked a broken link and potentially found a broken link opportunity:
- 404 Page not Found: This error means, the page or content has been removed and no longer exists from the website, a dead url (broken page).
- Bad Host: The server cannot be reached or doesn’t exist or the hostname is invalid.
- Bad Code: The server violated the HTTP Spec.
- 400 Bad Request: The host server doesn’t understand the URL on your page.
- Timeout: While trying to connect to the page, the server timed out.
Why Do Broken Link Building
It’s an inexpensive and easy-to-implement link building tactic for any business owner who wants to increase search traffic in a cost effective way. By spotting broken links or a dead resource and asking site owners to replace the broken link to your content, you will be able to build a solid backlink. The best part is that most owners won’t charge you, so it can be a great way to build links cheap!
As you may know, buying high quality backlinks can be expensive, so this is a great alternative to save money and outrank competing websites.
How To Find Broken Links
There are several free tools out there to help you find broken links on relevant websites in your industry and niche. These tools are great for spotting dead links, building backlinks and increasing your overall domain authority and improving search engine rankings.
We use SEMRUSH to find broken backlinks and broken link building opportunites for our clients.
Their site audit tool and dead link checker is great for finding broken links, it crawls the entire website in a matter of minutes, much faster than we could!
Other alternative tools such as Moz’s link explorer, Ahrefs site explorer and broken link checker are great for finding broken link building opportunities.
Our Broken Link Building Service
To save you much time and effort, you can hire a link building agency to do this broken link work for you. If you’re looking for a broken link finder, than here at Click Rank we’d be happy to help.
Our team of experts are trained to identify broken links and broken link opportunities on dead pages. When we look for broken link opportunities, we look at the overal picture of the domain, relevant content, how many referring domains, outbound links, top pages etc. These link building tactics ensures we build the best possible links, helping your site rank in search engines.
If you have any questions or you’re not quite sure where to start, feel free to reach out to us on a call. We highly recommend you start broken link building for your own website.
Broken link building outreach is simply the process of spotting broken links and then speaking to site owners about replacing links. Fixing broken pages(404 error message) with links to your content instead, is part of an outreach broken link building strategy.
To get the contact details of a site owner, most websites have a contact us page where you can find contact information in order to reach out to link prospects, offering a replacement link alternative.
A broken link building campaign is conducted by agencies and SEOs, to look for broken link building opportunities to improve a websites domain authority and it positions in Google search results.
The broken link building process is when SEOs use tools such as SEMRUSH to audit websites and get lists of broken links, broken pages and external links to be fixed. Using this information, they then conduct outreach by speaking to the site owners to fix these broken links.
