Broken Linkbuilding is Broken

If you’ve spent any time researching linkbuilding techniques it’s likely one of the first ideas you come across is broken link building. It sounds brilliant in theory, that’s why there are hundreds of guides on the process. Find dead links, offer your site as a replacement. The recipients of your pitch will see so much immediate value in swapping out a 404’d link with a link to your working site, they’ll all update their pages immediately; the conversion rate on this outreach will be off the charts.

In practice, it rarely works this way. Actually, the conversions on this style of linkbuilding aren’t typically any better than simply finding relevant pages to pitch your link to and forgetting the gimmick strategy altogether.

There’s a few reasons for this:

• Webpages tend to die of old age. This means that the page linking to them is likely also old and therefor not being updated any longer.
• Other linkbuilders have beaten you to it by now. If you’re in a competitive niche, the probabilty that someone else has found and outreached these targets is high. You’re digging through the literal garbage.
• These pitches are extremely easy to automate. If a site hasn’t received emails about the the particular link you’re reaching out to them about, it’s still likely they’ve received a pitch regarding a different dead link, and most of these emails are painfully the same.
• You don’t know the original intent behind that link. I mean, if it’s a piece of content, you can throw it into wayback machine and recreate it or even create a superior resource; if it’s a home page link, your service might genuinely be a better offering. These things will certainly improve your odds on a case by case basis but they don’t change the fact that links are created for a purpose and your site wasn’t part of that original purpose. And honestly if you’re able to sell your link to them under these circumstances, it’s likely they would have seen value in your link regardless of the broken link pitch.
• If the original link is now dead, what assurance do they have that yours wont eventually also die?
• They just don’t care.
• They don’t have edit privileges, whoever wrote it no longer works there, etc.
• They’ll simply say “thank you for letting me know, I’ve removed the broken link.” This is by far the most common, if you receive a reply at all. Sometimes they delete the page entirely (refer to the first bullet).

The list goes on.

So in addition to needing to “sell” your link in the same way you would any other link pitch, you also have to sell them on the mere idea that there’s any value in fixing that broken link. You’ve now created multiple barriers out of what once sounded like a brilliant strategy.

This doesn’t mean broken linkbuilding is a bad idea. Personally, I think even if something has a bad conversion rate it can still be worth doing. If your goal is to secure more links, then you should do more things to secure links.

However, the way most linkbuilders and nearly every guide on the topic tackles broken linkbuilding is flawed for all of the reasons I’ve outlined (and more).

Here are some things to try instead:

Try to find a page on the same site to replace the dead link

In cases where a link is dead or broken but the website still exists, if you can find a replacement for that link that exists at the same website your suggestion becomes immediately helpful rather than simply using a dead resource to promote your own. It shows you’re not just automating* pitches, you’re putting in real work to solve an issue for them. You can see this approach helped me land a great .edu link less than 2 hours after my email was sent.

*Even though you can totally still automate emails like this.

Let them know about multiple broken links

As in my previous screenshot, letting them know about multiple broken links can create a sense of urgency to fix them, shows you’ve actually looked at the page and comes off much more helpful than simply asking someone to replace a singular broken link with yours.

Find a broken link on a different page than the one you want a link on

If you’ve found a link opportunity it can be a good idea to search their site for any broken links you can also mention in your outreach. This also helps to make your outreach appear more personalized (even though you can totally automate it as well) by showing that you’re actually browsing their website. Another benefit to this one is it doesn’t have to be a broken external resource. You can find broken internal links or other issues with their website that you can help them fix, or something like maybe the link to their Facebook profile in the footer doesn’t work. There are a lot of ways you can play this one.

Find adjacent resources

This is also exemplified in my first screenshot. Instead of searching for resources that yours can be an exact replacement to, search for ones that have an intersecting relevance. For example, if you’re trying to build links to an article about home safety for senior citizens, you may search for a dead resource about disability accommodations, find a replacement for that dead disability accommodations website and then pitch your resource alongside it. You can search manually by Googling things like “disability accommodations guide inurl:resources”* but personally I like to let these opportunities find me. While you’re doing your regular link prospecting, keep an eye out for dead links that are adjacent topics to yours and you’re bound to discover great opportunities.

*I just Googled that exact phrase, checked for broken links on one of the first pages that stood out to me and found 4 great targets in about 20 seconds:

Offer someone else’s resource as a replacement

Find dead resources from highly authoritative sources and fix them

Mention the broken link in a followup

Mention the broken link after you’ve pitched your link

Redirects are better than 404s in a lot of cases