Broken Link Building in 2024: Is it Scalable?

Broken Link Building in 2024: Is it Scalable?

Ivan Escott

Ivan Escott

Partnerships Manager at Respona

Broken Link Building in 2024: Is it Scalable?

Broken link building is one of the lesser-used but still widely known link building strategies. 

And for a good reason: it requires quite a bit more effort than, say, the anchor text strategy or competitor backlinks.

In this article, we will be discussing:

  • What is broken link building
  • Whether broken link building is scalable or not
  • Three strategies for finding broken link building opportunities
  • How to conduct broken link building outreach

So, let’s get into it.

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Broken link building is a link building technique that revolves specifically around finding pages that have broken links, reaching out to the website owner, and offering your own page to replace the broken link.

When it is done correctly, it can be extremely efficient. However, compared to other link building strategies, quality backlinks prospects may not be as easy to come by.

This brings us to the next question. 

It depends. 

There is no definitive answer to this question as some people have a much easier time with broken link building than others. 

And to have any success with broken link building, you have to rely on other webmasters’ failure to identify broken backlinks on their pages. 

Which isn’t typically something you want to do, especially in SEO.

In addition, you can not effectively carry out broken link building without investing into dead link checker tools, such as Ahrefs Content Explorer or Semrush. Google Analytics and Google Search Console can’t help you here.

Yes, there are free plugins like Check My Links which we’ll be talking more about a bit further in the content, but their functionality is nowhere near as extensive as Semrush, for example. 

So, after all, is broken link building scalable? 

Yes – to an extent. 

Now, let’s take a closer look at how exactly you can go about securing broken link building opportunities. 

Let’s start with the easiest and least time-consuming strategies first. 

For the first two, we will be using Semrush. 

The ideal situation for broken link building is to find a dead page that has a bunch of backlinks

Semrush makes identifying these pretty easy. 

First, paste in the domain of one of your competitors into the search bar. 

semrush domain overview

Next, click on “Backlinks”. This will bring you into the backlinks analytics window. 

semrush backlinks overview

If you click over to the “Indexed Pages” tab, you will get an overview of all pages that are associated with your target domain. 

semrush indexed pages overview

How is this useful? 

Because if you toggle the “Broken Pages” option, Semrush will pull all of your target domain’s pages that have an error code. 

As you can see on the screenshot, the second link on the list is a blog post that has 1460 backlinks from 716 unique domains. 

Jackpot!

And if you click on that number, you’ll get a detailed overview of the exact URLs linking to the dead page. 

From there on, you can export the .CSV or Google Sheet to import into Respona later on. 

After cleaning up the sheet and weeding out low-quality opportunities, there will be much more than 1460 prospects, but still a good amount. 

But, if you look at the topic of the dead page, you’ll see that it’s about social media marketing and SEO, judging by its URL slug. 

We don’t have any relevant content that we could send to people to get them to link to us.

There are two ways out of this situation:

  1. Do some keyword research and write a blog post that covers that topic
  2. Seek for more relevant dead pages

Either approach is viable, however, you’re going to have much more success if you delve into custom quality content creation for your broken backlink building campaigns.

Doing so will also help you close any keyword gaps that you might have in your content marketing strategy. 

Let’s move on to the next strategy. 

Check Resource Pages and Listicles

The more external links a page has, the greater the chance that at least one of them is going to be broken. 

Resource pages, listicles, and bookmarking pages have dozens if not hundreds of links, so they can be a lucrative way of discovering broken ones as well.

To find resource pages, all you need is any search engine and a couple of advanced search operators.

finding resource pages in google

Try the following combinations:

  • Keyword inurl:resources
  • Keyword intitle:links
  • Keyword helpful resources”
  • Keyword useful resources”

Once you find a resource page, you’re going to need a way to quickly check all of its outbound links. 

A great plugin for this is Check My Links – and it’s absolutely free. You can install it to your browser directly from the Chrome Web Store.

check my links plugin

As you can see, this resource page by The Gray Dot Company has over 200 links, 4 of which are broken:

using check my links

Now, let’s see which links are dead.

Check My Links doesn’t provide you with a handy list of all links, but it highlights broken links in red on the actual page, making them easy to find:

check my links highlighting broken links

Okay, now that we have found the broken page, let’s see how many backlinks it actually has. 

Once again, we can use Semrush for this.

semrush backlinks overview 2

37 backlinks from 26 referring domains – not bad! 

Repeat this process for multiple resource pages and keywords and you will get yourself a bunch of broken external link building opportunities. 

The downside to using this strategy is that it’s nowhere near as scalable as the previous one – identifying dead pages on a domain and revealing their backlinks.

There are also way more clicks and effort involved in resource page broken link building, so we recommend sticking to the first tactic that we shared. 

This is more of a passive broken link building prospecting strategy but can be quite handy. 

Whenever you’re going through pages – be it for content research, or just trying to learn something, keep Check My Links ready to scan for broken links. 

You never know when you might stumble across a link to a dead page with hundreds of backlinks just ready to be snatched for you. 

Now that you know how to find dead link building opportunities, let’s take a look at how you can actually reach out and get them to link to you instead. 

Create Your Email Sequence

The first step of a broken link builder campaign is to prepare your blogger outreach sequence – the initial pitch along with a follow-up or two.

respona email sequence builder 1

Respona’s email editor comes with a set of nifty features for crafting the perfect broken link building pitch.

First of all, notice the variables like @first_name and @url_title? These will be automatically populated for each prospect in your campaign, saving you a good chunk of time which you can spend on more in-depth, manual personalization.

You can also add AI-powered variables like “P.S” – they will generate unique personalizations for every single broken link building opportunity in your campaign, and increase your chances of getting a reply/

Secondly, you may add up to 5 automatic follow-ups with custom delays between them.

However, we recommend sticking to just one or two in order to avoid spamming.

Speaking of spamming, if you click on the yellow (or green, or red, depending on the quality of your pitch) dot in the top right corner, you’ll see our very own reply chance estimator:

respona reply chance estimator

As you can see, we have a decent chance of getting a response with our current pitch – but we can make it even better by adding a question, removing a spam word and making the subject linejust a tiny bit longer.

Finally, let’s add an unsubscribe link to our email to give people an easy way to opt out of further communications. 

adding an unsubscribe sequence

This helps with spam rates – and will save you from some rude replies. 

Here is the exact template we have used:

Hi, [first_name]

Just wanted to give you a quick heads up that you’re still linking to GroupHigh (who has recently gone out of business) from at least one of your pages.

May I suggest a potential replacement for the broken link (our blog post)?

More than happy to also reference your article in one of the guest posts I’m writing.

[P.S]

Cheers,

[Signature]

Import Your Prospects into Respona

The second step is to import your broken link building opportunities into Respona. 

You can do so through a .CSV file. 

If you’re using Semrush to find broken links, simply click on the “export” button at the top right of the backlinks report, and choose “CSV”. 

exporting backlinks from semrush

Once it’s downloaded, create a campaign in Respona and choose the CSV Import mode. 

importing a .CSV in respona

As for the import mode, keep it as “Websites”, since we don’t have actual contact emails just yet. 

Respona will help us identify these automatically. However, if you already managed to get your prospects’ emails, choose the “Contacts” import mode. 

Next, you will need to assign your file fields to the corresponding Respona variables.

Semrush provides CSVs with tons of file fields that are irrelevant to our campaign, but the two most important ones are URL and URL title. 

assigning fields

Assign these to URL title and URL variables respectively. 

Then, hit “Continue” and enable a simultaneous contact search for your opportunities.

For broken link building, set the opportunity type to blogs and enter the job titles of all relevant decision makers (like SEO, content and digital marketing managers) into the “Job titles” field, on all seniority levels.

We also recommend enabling the two advanced options:

  • Skip catch-all domains
  • Use generic emails as needed

These will help increase the success rate of the contact search automaiton, while minimizing the risk of bounces by avoiding catch-all emails.

contact finder and ai personalization settings

In the next field, you can provide additional instructions to your AI personalizations if you have used any in your sequence.

You can train it on examples of your previous personalizations’ tone and style.

After you click “Import”, Respona will pull the websites from your .CSV into your outreach campaign and find their contact information all at the same time.

Review & Launch

Personalization is vital to the success of any link building outreach campaign, and broken link building is not an exception.

Any variables that you have inserted into your template at Step 2 will automatically be changed here – including AI personalizations.

By default, the AI “reads” your prospects’ content and comes up with personalizations based on topics they discussed.

personalizing emails

Before launching your emails, Respona will also run a set of final verifications to make sure you’re not trying to reach out to any recent and unsubscribed contacts (or ones that are active in another campaign), and that your emails don’t contain any placeholder brackets or empty variables.

pre-launch checks

Now Over To You

So, after all, is broken link building scalable in 2024?

It can be, if you’re willing to search for dead content on your competitors’ domains and replicate them on your own.

This is quite a bit more effort than other, more beginner-friendly link building strategies require. 

But, if you do decide to delve into it, and need help with the actual outreach, don’t hesitate to start your 14-day free trial with Respona to see how we can speed up the broken link building process!

Link building cheat sheet

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Broken link building is an important link building strategy because it has a very high success rate – after all, nobody likes having a broken URL on their page.

You need to set aside some time, and invest into backlink monitoring and SEO tools like Semrush/Ahrefs or plugins like Check My Links, as well as email outreach software like Respona. 

Despite its high success rate, broken link building can be difficult to scale as it relies entirely on your competitors having broken pages, which makes this SEO strategy somewhat inconsistent.

Pro tip: It may be lucrative for local SEO if you know a local competitor has gone out of business, but such cases are few and far between.

In our experience, the top three link building strategies are: anchor text link building, reverse skyscraper technique (competitor backlinks), and guest posting. 

The best way to writing a broken link building email pitch is to politely let the prospect know about their broken link, and add an extra incentive for them to change the link to point to you instead.

Such an incentive can be an indirect link back to them, for example. 

Ivan Escott

Article by

Ivan Escott

Ivan is the partnerships manager at Respona, the all-in-one PR and link building tool that combines personalization with productivity. Along with creating content, he looks for unique ways to build meaningful relationships with other bloggers.

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