In our previous post, we discussed dead link building aka broken link building in which non-functioning links on various sites are identified and reported to the webmaster. The main goal of this method or technique is to replace the broken link with a working link from your page. What’s good about this method is that all parties involved can benefit from it. The owner of the website receives information about the broken links and fixes it without exerting that much effort, you’re rewarded with links that are relevant and high quality, and the readers are steered clear of 404 pages when they’re navigating around the page. It’s a win-win situation for everybody. You can read more about this process in the Essential Broken Link Building Guide. In the current post, we move further and discuss how to implement broken link building strategy for SEO.

Now before you get your hands busy with broken link building, you must understand that it takes a lot of time and effort in order for it to be successful. It’s a simple concept, yes, but as with other things in life it also requires hard work.

Finding Broken Links

The first step in broken link building is finding dead links from the following:

● Sites that are relevant to your niche

● High-quality sites that you want your link to be placed in

● Sites that will receive benefits from linking to your page

● You can start by doing a general search and, depending on the sites that appear on the results, toss in a few more keywords so you can zero in on your target sites.

Here are some Boolean search operators that you can use to narrow down the search results:

a) Minus sign – this eliminates results that are not needed. For example, if you type “-.pdf”, PDFs won’t be included in the search results. Adding “-site:facebook.com” removes pages that are from Facebook and “-furniture” eliminates pages that contain the word “furniture”.

b) Inurl: keyword – this will give you results where the selected keyword is part of the URL. For example, “inurl: California” will return results that have the word “California” in the URL.

c) Intitle: keyword – this will give you results where the keyword is part of the title. For example, “intitle: Biology” will return results from pages where the word “Biology” is part of the title.

d) Intext: keyword – this will return results where the selected keyword is part of the text. For instance, “intext: handicrafts” will give you results where the word “handicrafts” is part of the text.

It is highly recommended that you paste the URLs of page-specific and relevant sites on a spreadsheet so you can easily track them. Normally, people would go through, every single website in the search result to check if there’s a broken link. While that’s one way of scouting for dead links, it can also be time-consuming so it’s best if you make use of tools like the Domain Hunter Plus to make things easier for you.

Domain Hunter Plus is a Google Chrome extension that will analyze and browse the existing links on the page, point out the broken ones, and which ones still have available domains. It also gives you the freedom to export if you want. Other tools that you can use are Ahrefs Site Explorer where you can view all of the 404 pages or broken links in a domain, Check My Links, Screaming Frog, and Xenu Link Sleuth. We have even mentioned about this in our Feature Tool Wednesdays Section that is live every Wednesday on all our official pages. You can check out this tweet for instance –

#CheckMyLinks #PaulLivingstone #BrokenLinkBuilding pic.twitter.com/jZH4796DkE

— Ashwarya Infotech (@ashwaryainftch) December 7, 2016

Strategies To Implement Broken Link Building

Normally, broken link building revolves around a marketer informing a webmaster about the dead links on the page. To return the favor, the webmaster will use the marketer’s links on his or her page. Ideally, this is how it goes. Most people think that they should stop there but the thing is, there are so many strategies that they can do with broken link building. The benefits can actually be maximized with a little bit of creativity.

For starters, they can combine secondary link building and broken link building. The marketer can do this if he or she feels that the webmaster won’t be returning the favor or is taking an awfully long time to respond. What they can do instead is ask for a link or post that’s already pointing to his or her site. This spares the marketer from spam signals, and still benefits from the value of having high-quality links on the site.

Finding a broken link is like finding a key that allows you to get the webmaster’s attention. While reporting broken links can be used as an excuse or a high-value reason for contacting someone (and getting that person to listen), you do not need to feel disheartened if your target website has zero broken links. You can actually contact them to inform them that there are grammatical errors or that there is a typo somewhere in their page. The chances of getting your links on their site may be a little low, but at least you were given an opening to also pitch about your links.

Now, you might be thinking that all you have to do is search for broken links, inform the webmaster, ask them to use your links, and you’re good to go. Technically that’s a yes, but the thing is, there is more to broken link building than just links. You’re actually working on relationships with other people, expanding your network, and exploring the possibility of collaborations. When we said that you have one foot in the moment you find a broken link, we weren’t just referring to the link. We meant you, as a marketer, are given the opportunity to tell them about you and your site.

Broken link building boils down to having a site that has an impressive layout and high-quality content. While it’s no secret that this method rewards people based on their efforts, it does not in any way mean you can relax and settle for mediocre sites because webmasters would not even consider linking to those sites. Yes, coming up with good content does take a while, but it’s essential if you want to succeed in broken link building.