You can drive tons of traffic to your website using any one of several strategies. However, one element that has become extremely important in recent years – user experience. Google has begun to favor sites with faster loading speeds, mobile-friendly navigation, and high-quality user experiences. One of the most frustrating experiences for a user is broken links.
It’s annoying for visitors to arrive on your site only to find a 404 error page instead of the high-quality content you know they deserve. However, as webmasters continue to move their sites to new locations and neglect to renew their hosting, broken links will forever plague the internet. These broken links clutter the SERPs and create a massive loss of revenue for businesses.
While a broken link is less than perfect and results in a poor user experience, it provides an excellent opportunity to add value. One way to handle dead links is to create 404 pages. However, there’s so much more you can do with broken links.
In this post, we’ll explore five creative ways of leveraging broken links to create a powerful link building campaign.
Score an Encyclopedia Inbound Link from this Authoritative Source
Any marketer worth their salt has visited Wikipedia while searching for information on the web.
Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced encyclopedia with an army of editors tasked with maintaining the site’s credibility and lack of bias. That being said, any sort of self-promotion marketing efforts on the platform will fail – this is a pure fact.
However, it’s possible to develop an effective link building system from this authoritative site that will earn lots of targeted traffic. You also gain second-tier inbound links from web pages that link to the Wikipedia page where you’re listed.
Because Wikipedia has a wealth of information on various subjects, tons of broken links or information require a citation. When a Wikipedia editor finds a dead link, they tag it with a footnote.
There are three primary ways to find these broken link opportunities.
How to Find Broken Link Opportunities
First, you can search for them under Wikipedia’s article that lists dead external links.
You can also use a string on Google, such as site:wikipedia.org [your niche keyword] + “dead link”
From there, you’ll visit the relevant page from the results and search the page for broken links. You can do this by using CTRL+F to search for “dead link” and spot the broken external links.
The last method involves using a tool to find Wikipedia pages that need a citation or dead link replacements. One of my favorites is WikiGrabber.
This tool returns a pile of pages that require citations. You’ll also find pages with dead external links when you scroll down.
Again, use CTRL+F to bring up the search box and enter the keywords “citation needed” or “dead link” to find the exact link building opportunities.
Once you’ve located a handful of dead links, it’s time to feed them into a backlink analysis tool.
Why?
Doing so will help you identify the broken links with the most link building juice. It will also help scale your building campaign beyond the scope of Wikipedia.
Next, you’ll want to plug the broken link into the Internet Wayback Machine to determine the original content marketing effort.
You will need to skyscraper this content marketing effort and improve the general quality to improve your chances of earning a link building opportunity.
Edit the Wikipedia Article
Once you’ve published your content, you can edit a Wikipedia article and include a link to your article.
I would encourage you to conduct 4-5 additional clean-ups on other relevant articles in your niche and try other link building techniques towards other websites. Doing so ensures that your Wikipedia profile history earns some value addition, and you don’t come across as a marketer.
If your changes are approved, you’ve earned yourself a nofollow link!
Scaling your link building campaign is a great idea. You can do so by extracting the email address of webmasters of other referring domains to the broken link and asking them for a link for the ultimate reciprocal link acquisition.
Secondary Broken Link Building
If you’ve ever conducted link-building techniques for outreach, you likely know that earning high-quality links has become more challenging.
One reason why many outreach campaigns fail is because of some lazy marketers who copy email templates.
There are a lot of templates out there, but you cannot copy them word-for-word.
In case you weren’t already aware, Google penalizes unnatural outbound links.
With that in mind, webmasters are even more hesitant to link to external websites since doing so may send spam signals.
You can employ one risk-free strategy to ensure the recipient doesn’t feel used and quickly sees the value added for his audience.
Provide reciprocal link building to authoritative websites that are linking to your website.
Let’s say you find a dead link on a site associated with your expertise. Instead of asking for a direct backlink, you can encourage the webmaster to link to a blog post you’ve written on a highly authoritative site, such as Entrepreneur, Forbes, HuffPost, etc.
Ask for the Link
Once published on said authoritative site, you can ask webmasters to link the dead link to your guest post.
Landing a link to content on a highly-authoritative post is far easier than twisting a webmaster to link directly to your site. Doing so comes across more as providing a benefit than asking for a backlink. Furthermore, webmasters will likely feel more secure linking to a powerful domain. Lastly, you’re bound to gain some link juice since the post on the high-authority site contains a link to your site.
I am in no way advocating for questionable two-tier link building. Instead, I’m encouraging the practice Rohit Palit describes as tiered link building.
Invert the Way You Look at Broken Links
Traditional broken link building dictates that you search for websites with broken links, create better content, and then conduct an outreach campaign promoting the fresh content you’ve created.
While this method is effective and produces, what if you took a different approach? Here’s a slightly tweaked version that is worthy of your consideration:
Find expired domains in your niche and request links from webmasters who currently link to those dead sites.
Here’s a quick three-step breakdown!
Step 1
First, you’ll want to find expired domains that likely contain content associated with your niche. You can use a tool like expireddomains.net to find viable domains.
Here are the results for “digital marketing.”
Next, you’ll want to sort your results by the number of referring domains.
You can also locate expired high-authority domains on auction sites like GoDaddy and Flippa. These avenues are helpful since the domains are well-organized by their value, which makes it easy to find websites with high-quality link building opportunities.
Step 2
Next, you’ll want to copy the domains you found along with the link volume data into an Excel or Google Sheet. Please note that the top twelve sites with the most backlinks from unique domains provide 2,724 broken link opportunities. I don’t know about you, but that’s a HUGE pile of opportunities that you can cash in on!
Step 3
Once you copy your data into a spreadsheet, you need to check the link profile for each domain and weed out the spammy ones. You can use Ahref’s Site Explorer to research each domain’s link profile.
Once you uncover an expired website with a strong link profile, you’ll want to identify its most linked pages. Again, you can use Ahrefs here.
Next, you’ll want to use Archive.org to extract the content marketing efforts of each page and use it as a measuring stick to craft a far higher quality piece of content.
After you compose a fresh piece of high-quality content, you can finally reach out to the websites that currently link to the dead domain.
Input Broken Links into a Backlink Analytics Tool to Uncover More Link Sources
We already touched on this strategy in the second half of the Wikipedia broken link building strategy. This method calls for you to squeeze the most juice from broken links on authoritative websites in your niche.
So, how do you find broken links on highly authoritative websites other than Wikipedia?
Great question!
Screaming Frog is my go-to tool when I need to find broken incoming links to my competitors.
With Screaming Frog, you input a relevant and high-authority URL from your niche and press the start button. Once the platform works its magic, you can sort the results but their status code.
From there, you need to find a 404 link, which you will then plug into Ahrefs and identify the other websites linking to the 404 you identified via Screaming Frog.
You can also sort the domains based on their domain rating to see if they’re a reasonable fit for you to target.
Convert a Broken Link Opportunity into a Relationship
To survive today, you need to network and build relationships with your entrepreneur and marketing peers.
Discovering broken links on an established blog and letting them know about it is a major value-add to their audience. In other words, it’s a great way to start a new friendship on a positive note.
Once you get a response from the website owner, you can easily convert the one-time opportunity into a long-term partnership. For example, you could ask if they accept guest posting on their website.
However, suggesting broken links on an industry influencer’s website might not be the best way to start a relationship. Why? Fixing broken links isn’t the best use of their time.
Instead, you’ll have far more success if you reach out to bloggers on the same level as you.
Closing Thoughts
In just about every niche, there are a plethora of websites with countless broken links. This is why link rot is such an excellent link building opportunity.
You can think outside the box and extract much more value from broken links. The five actionable strategies we’ve covered should inspire you to get back on the drawing board and incorporate the applicable ones in your overall SEO strategy.
Remember, creativity pays off. However, it helps if you experiment, and that will take time.
