Broken Link Building – What It Is and How To Use It

Broken Link Building is a White Hat SEO technique used by SEO professionals to get much needed backlinks from authority sites, the right way. Links are the currency of the Web, and to get noticed on Google and to rank highly on Google’s SERPs (or search engine results pages), it is important to have as many backlinks pointing at your content as possible. 

However, there are things that you cannot do, such as paying for backlinks, as this would violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. If Google catches you doing that, the punishment would be swift and your site would be permanently blacklisted from its search engine. Broken Link Building is a permissible way to build links for your website – it is so White Hat that even the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin would approve it!   

Basically, Broken Link Building involves pointing out links that don’t work, are dead or non-functional on a website, in return for having them replaced with your own links. This is a great way to clear the Web of the clutter of dead links and make it cleaner and more functional.

Why Broken Link Building is such a useful SEO technique?

Broken Link Building is as legit as it gets and it is a terrific way to get your links added by the most reputable sites in your niche. You don’t need to be an expert at SEO to master this link building strategy; it is just as easy as it is efficient. Link building in general is a laborious process, it requires you to establish a relationship with site owners, write guest blogs for them, ask them to review your products, etc. Broken link building helps you avoid such hassles. It is the most painless way to build links for your website.

How to find Broken Links?

First, use the right tools. Some of the tools that can be of a lot of help are…

Google Alerts: Great tool for checking the sites in your niche. You can easily tell if any of them go out of business. When they do, it is just a matter of approaching the sites carrying their links and asking them to replace the now defunct links with those of yours.

Link Checker: Link Checker is a great browser extension that allows you to see broken links on any site at instantly.

CognitiveSEO: CognitiveSEO is one of the better backlink reporting tools using which you can filter the backlinks by and then sort them according to their authority.

Next, use the tool Link Checker to identify the dead links on the most important sites in your niche. Run every broken link that you’re able to identify through the backlink reporting tool – CognitiveSEO. This identifies all the active sites that are still linking to the dead domain. This way, you will probably find dozens of sites very quickly. 

Follow all websites and blogs in your niche on Twitter and Facebook, so that you will know immediately as soon as they go out of business. Google Alerts, about which we talked about earlier, keeps you updated about sites that go offline as well.

Another great technique is to use Yelp for local broken link opportunities. Look for local businesses on Yelp that have closed in your area. Their websites are likely to be closed as well. Now run these domains through a backlink reporting tool and identify the websites that link to them. 

The last step is to contact the Webmasters about the broken links on their websites. Get in touch with them and request them to replace the broken links with those of yours. To do so, you will have to find their contact information first. Here’s how you do that.

• You will most likely find their email address on the “contact us” or “about us” page on their website. Check the footer as well

• Do the following search on Google - “domain.com email” or “domain.com @domain.com hotmail.com yahoo.com gmail.com msn.com live.com”

• Is there a “contact us” form on the website?

• Do they have a Twitter handle?

These are just some of the techniques you can use to find the contact information of a webmaster. A word of advice is to be polite and professional while interacting with them, and in 90 percent of the cases, the webmasters add your links to their site as a matter of courtesy for pointing out the broken links. 

To learn more about this and other techniques, visit Markham SEO and check out our Blog.

Images courtesy of Elegant Themes & Military Hunting and Fishing.