Broken link building is one of the most popular link building tactics around. It’s the fifth most widely used tactic—according to Aira’s annual state of link building report, which crowdsources opinions from over 250 digital marketing professionals.
But it’s not entirely foolproof, and there’s some nuance to doing it well.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get backlinks from broken link building.
But first, let’s cover the basics.
What is broken link building?
Does broken link building still work?
How to do broken link building
What is broken link building?
Broken link building is where you find a dead page with backlinks, create a similar page, then ask people linking to that page to link to you instead. The idea is that they’ll swap the link because they don’t want to send visitors to a broken resource.
Does broken link building still work?
It would be fair to say that SEOs are somewhat divided when it comes to this question.
In one video, Mark from Authority Hacker said:
I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s an almost pointless tactic, and you shouldn’t waste your time with it.
If you dig through the comments on that video, one stands out:
YouTube commenter blaming Ahrefs for making broken link building sound so easy
Let’s set the record straight:
Broken link building isn’t easy. Sometimes, it works well. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
Is this because there’s something inherently wrong with the tactic?
No. It’s because link building is hard to execute well—whatever tactic you use. The better you understand the tactic, the more likely you are to have success.
How to do broken link building
Broken link building is a four-step process.
Find broken pages with backlinks
Vet the backlinks
Create a replacement page
Do outreach
1. Find broken pages with backlinks
It’s impossible to find highly linked broken pages without SEO tools. Even if you find dead pages manually, you’ll need a backlink checker to see how many links they have. You can use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker for this, but life is much easier with full access to Ahrefs.
Keep this in mind as we go through the tactics below. You’ll need Ahrefs for ¾ of them.
Here are the tactics:
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Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
Look for broken pages about a topic
Look for broken links on competing websites
Look for broken links on resource pages (doable without paid Ahrefs)
a) Look for your competitors’ broken pages with backlinks
Many of your competitors will have at least some dead pages because everyone moves, deletes, and reorganizes content over time. If they forget to redirect old URLs when doing this, their backlinks will point to broken pages.
Here’s how to find dead pages on your competitors’ websites:
Go to Site Explorer
Enter a competing domain
Go to the Best by links report
Filter for “404 not found” pages
Sort the report by Referring domains from highest to lowest
For example, there are 134 dead pages on Content Marketing Institute’s website, and some have backlinks from over 50 referring domains.