Broken Link Building

[Samwise89]

I read the newest Newsstand post earlier, where a guy wrote about broken link building.

He basically said to go to big sites and look at their "best posts by backlinks" on Ahrefs and then filter down only to ones with 404 errors. When you find ones with tons of links, recreate the content on your site and do the outreach for it. But by choosing posts with tons of links you have a much better chance of getting links, since you'll probably get a 5% success rate. It keeps you from spending all your time preparing new content.

Has anyone gone hard at this method? How did it pan out for you?

I'll try it soon, it makes a lot of sense. Surely if you re-built 5-10 pages, made them visually attractive, and did outreach to 1000 sites, you'd get at least 25 links if not 50 or more... I'd hope. Sending that many personalized and genuine sounding emails sounds like it will take forever though.

I don't mean to get into "outreach tips" since we have enough of that in the crash course. I'm just curious if anyone has used this extensively and effectively.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

The key is to target 'small' but 'big enough' broken pages. When broken link building first became popular all the people who had a broken link to a page that had 500+ links to it got emailed dozens of times to the point where they sent amusing responses to people who did the outreach about all the pills pages they'd been pitched etc. One chap even sent me a selection of 20 outreach emails he'd had that WEEK....

So yeah this guide makes a lot of sense - it recommends picking up pages with a handful (the one he did had 68 or something) broken links, and probably went down fairly recently - that's important too - the longer a page has been broken the more people will have hit up all the people linking to it.

The other thing you'll notice is that it was a page on just a 'regular blog' that they targeted. That's important too. Too many people are out there scraping big govt sites then blasting the broken links. Not only is that too obvious (so dozens of emails have hit those people often already) but a lot of the people only link to 'that kind of resource'. Finding things that are less exposed and more like for like with your blog gives you a much better chance - AHREFS and Brian Dean's blog are probably similarly 'famous' in the niche so it's very like for like.

I haven't hit it hard for over a year now - I did a batch or two when we started a new site up a while back - but you'll definitely see solid results at around the level you're expecting if you take your time and do all the little things (mix the template up for every send etc, find the right person and so on) right.

Bonus points (and usually a better reply rate) if you do the following too:

* Tell them about all the other broken links on the page and suggest replacements for those too... (this can be hit and miss - only do this if your page is better than the other replacements).

* Try a two-step outreach process - tell them there's some broken links and check they're the right person to tell. Then send the 'request' when they reply. The beauty of this too is that it saves time on the initial emails as - in your example - you are planning to have 5-10 potential guides to swap in - you only need to look at their page and customise your reply after they reply. Again results have varied with this but usually it's the better play by several % points on link rate as you get forwarded to, then replied to by the right person a lot when you didn't catch the right person/it was impossible to find them first time around.