Joshua Hardwick
Broken links occur when webpages link out to resources that are no longer there.
For example, CitationLabs links out to a post entitled “Broken link building with Raven’s Link Manager and local directories” from this blog post:
But, when you click the link, you’re taken to this page:
Oops, it seems the post was deleted (which means the link is broken).
Most webmasters will make every effort to fix broken links as they give their visitors a negative experience.
It also makes it look as though their site is rarely updated.
Broken link building is a three-step process that involves:
- Finding industry-specific webpages with one or more broken links
- Reaching out to the webmaster and alerting them of the problem
- Suggesting they replace the broken link with a link to your site
Note: The link that you suggest as a replacement to the broken link MUST be as close to the original piece of content as possible. It’s no use finding a broken link to an epic blog post, then suggesting your ecommerce store homepage as a replacement. That would be like replacing an iPhone with a rotary dialler.
Here’s how to do it:
First, you need to find industry-specific webpages that you would like to obtain a link from.
These are almost always resource or links pages.
Here are a couple of Google search operators you can use to find these pages:
And…
This should return a search results page that looks something like this:
When you find a page that fits the bill, you need to check it for broken links.
Install the Check My Links Chrome Add-on to do this:
Once installed, click the button to run it on the page:
All broken links will now be highlighted in red.
Make a note of each page and any broken links in a spreadsheet. Try to find the webmasters contact details (i.e. email address) if possible, too.
Reach out to each webmaster with this script:
“Hey [NAME],
I’m [YOUR NAME], [POSITION] at [WEBSITE].
I’m was just reading your post about [TOPIC] and noticed one of the links wasn’t working.
Here’s a screenshot of the dead link: [INSERT SCREENSHOT]
Just thought I’d give you a heads-up.
[YOUR NAME]
PS. If you’re looking for a replacement for the link, this page might be good: [INSERT LINK]”
Thanks for this Tip, would be grateful if you reply to my question, how do you usually find webmaster’s contact info?
Konstantine, there are a few ways to do this:
– Look for their email address on their “contact” or “about” pages (it’s usually somewhere on these);
– Scrape their site for contact information (using something like URL Profiler);
– Put their website URL into Buzzstream (or a similar tool – e.g. Ninja Outreach) and it’ll try to find their email addresses;
– Find their name (usually on their “about” page) and put it into a tool like hunter.io;
– Guess their email (Google “email permutator” and this one should make sense.
Hope that helps 🙂