The concept of broken link building is not a new one, but is one getting mentioned more frequently on forums and websites in the SEO world. It is a white hat technique which offers a number of advantages, and is able to be scaled relatively easily.
Essentially, the strategy involves:
- Locating high quality resource sites in your / your clients industry.
- Scanning these sites for broken links.
- Contacting the owner of the site letting them know about the broken link and suggesting they update it to link to a relevant article on your website.
This sounds like a reasonably simple SEO strategy, however the reason it works so well is because you are offering something of value to the owner of the other site. The majority of site owners want quality content themselves so are motivated to update the link in a timely manner. There are a huge number of broken links appearing on a daily basis so there is no chance of running out of opportunities, making this a long term strategy rather than a one off.
There are two main ways to source broken links for this strategy:
- Once you find a target site that you want a link from, use a tool to analyse all links on the site for broken links such as: http://frayd.us/extensions/linkchecker/
- Find an old quality site in your industry which no longer exists or is now a parked domain, look up this domain name on a tool such as MajesticSEO then identify the quality sites which are still linking to this website.
Once you have found the sites with broken links, the next step is to contact the owners. This can be automated using software but I would recommend starting out manually to get a good feel for the process. To improve this SEO strategy you can then split test different emails, try sequences of emails and scale the strategy by employing a team of broken link finders. As always with SEO strategies, you need to balance the amount of time put into a strategy with the output of links so make sure you measure everything you do.
