The web is an ever changing place, with websites popping up, then disappearing all the time. You may well have started projects yourself then abandoned them after a couple of years; leaving them to fester and forgetting about them until the domain name eventually expires – I know I have.
This is good news for the link builder.
Because it means that the web is full of broken links.
Broken links that you can fix.
Broken link building is without doubt one of the most powerful weapons in the link builders arsenal, and in terms of outreach, one of the highest converting.
There are a number of ways to go about finding broken link opportunities (see links below), but let's quickly walk through a very basic example.
For the purposes of this exercise we'll assume you have a website about dolphins (everyone loves dolphins right?!).
To find opportunities you'll want to use Google search queries to your advantage. Let's start with a simple one: -
dolphins inurl:links
This searches for the keyword 'dolphins' and pages which have the word 'links' in the url.
Let's go to that first result and use the free chrome extension 'check my links' (link in tools below) to scan the page for broken links.
The extension will highlight broken links – there are 10.
So we can now do two things:-
Firstly we can reach out to this site, advise of the broken links and recommend our website as a replacement.
More importantly though, we can take each of the broken links and plug it into Ahrefs.
That first broken link has 51 referring domains – so from just one broken link, we have discovered 51 potential link opportunities.
Rinse and repeat and you will uncover hundreds of opportunities, with a great 'in' for outreach and a high conversion rate.
The above example is pretty basic, but gives an indication of how powerful the tactic of broken link building is.
Going advanced, you can use tools such as archive.org to find expired content, bring it up to date and offer your new content as an alternative to the broken link.
Further Reading
Recommended Tools