When many digital marketing pros think about link building, their minds jump to the standard outreach process. People think of guidelines explaining how to make the best email subject line when requesting inclusion in a publication, or they think about the best use of HARO. These methods can be very effective, but the ROI is largely out of your control. Not all respond positively to emails and pitches, leaving marketers scrambling to find new sources.
Fortunately, there are some highly effective link building strategies that give marketers more control and serve users and website owners alike. These strategies rely specifically on broken backlinks.
What are Broken Backlinks?
Just like broken internal links on sites that serve 4xx client codes, backlinks can happen when external links from a site point to pages that don't exist on another domain. This usually happens when the page URL changes or the linking site adds the wrong URL.
In fact, Internet professionals have long known about the tendency for links/pages not to exist. This phenomenon is commonly known as "link rot" and many sites suffer from it. A study conducted by WooRank found that 12.2% of backlinks from e-commerce sites lead to 404 pages.
Although the study only looked at e-commerce sites, it's quite possible to find similar trends in other industries. We've actually seen this play out in academia. A 2014 study by the Harvard Law Review found that as many as 20 percent of backlinks can die after just one year, and that percentage increases over time.
If the rate at which links rot is shocking you, you're not alone. The exponential rate of broken backlinks is a huge amount of link equity wasted.
Given how pervasive this connection is, it might be surprising to see how little these tactics are discussed by seasoned marketers. This may be due to people going overboard with the largely misunderstood "freshness" factor, choosing to focus solely on earning links from new content, without reviewing the missed opportunities of "old" backlinks.
However, old backlinks are still valuable. Marketers can find valuable treasures through link recycling and outreach efforts. All it takes is keeping an eye out for broken links pointing to your site and your competitors' sites.
Broken Link: Reclamation and Construction
There are two important differences between broken link recycling and broken link building. Link recycling aims to literally reclaim the value of broken links to your site. Broken link building, on the other hand, is the process by which you recreate content to replace your competitors' broken backlinks.
These methods are slightly different, but both give you more control than standard link building outreach tasks. They can also make a huge difference if implemented properly.
My client Ultimate Whale Watch & Snorkel was involved in a particularly successful backlinking program. After starting cultivation and promotion efforts, the level of organic traffic and ranking keywords (below) grew the following year at a much higher rate than in recent years.
Organic keywords to rank for in Ultimate Whale Watch & Snorkel.
The important thing to note here is the industry the client is in. Despite being in the travel/travel industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, UWW saw a 171.2% year-over-year increase in organic traffic and a 257.2% increase in organic keywords.
Combined with other link building tools in your belt, broken link recovery and building efforts can prove fruitful. Here are the steps we recommend for both processes:
Broken Backlink Recycling
Step 1: Analyze your website's backlinks. First, you need to determine how many, if any, of backlinks to your site are broken. Ahrefs is a great tool for analyzing this data, allowing you to see which backlinks are pointing to dead links.
Open and log in to Ahrefs, and analyze your domain.
Step 2: Clean up your broken backlinks. Navigate to the Broken Links icon under Backlinks in the left menu and click on it. You will then see a list of all broken backlinks for the site.
It is useful to organize the backlinks in this list by the "DR" (Domain Rating) column. This puts the highest value links at the top of the list. You can then export them to a spreadsheet for further inspection.
Step 3: Select the link you want to break. This handy data table will show the source of the backlink, the anchor text and the URL it points to. Analyze the external domains listed and determine if backlinking is worthwhile. You may determine that some of them are irrelevant, low-privileged, or just plain spam. It is best to look for backlinks originating from authoritative sites that use relevant anchor text.
Step 4: Retrieve the broken link value. Once you've compiled your list of backlinks you'd like to reclaim, take a look at your own website and decide which link would be the most ideal alternative.
There are two main approaches from here.
Option A: Contact the website owner of the backlink and let them know that the backlink is broken. Provide them with the relevant replacement link and ask them to update it. Ideally, the webmaster will be happy for you to point out the broken link on their site and add the live URL.
Option B: Sometimes the website owner does not respond. In this case, you can easily regain the lost link value by redirecting. Set up 301 (permanent) redirects to relevant pages on your website. This way, you will regain the lost link value and the user will arrive at the live page.
Are 301 redirects invalid for backlinks? Marketers have long debated the exact amount of link equity (or PageRank) passed through a 301 redirect. This is mostly due to confusion over the way Google and other big search engines treat them.
To clarify the issue, Google's John Mueller explained how their search engine specifically uses 301 redirects as instructions to canonical URLs. So if you set up a redirect link that isn't topically similar enough to the original link, Google may treat the broken link as a soft 404. However, highly relevant redirects may gain close to 100% ranking advantage.
That's why it's so important to make sure the redirect fits the missing content. You want search engines to treat redirected URLs as canon.
Using competitor data to build link breaks
Step 1: Analyze your competitors' backlinks. Pick a competitor and analyze it in Ahrefs in the same way as above.
Step 2: Find relevant dead backlinks. Sort broken backlinks by relevance. Take a look at your own site and determine if what you're including is similar to the topic of the link in question. This will be the broken link you will replace on the third-party site.
Step 3: Provide the perfect replacement content. Now it's time to gather some relevant replacement content. If you're starting from scratch, look at the subject of the linking site, as well as the anchor text, and use that as a springboard for new pages. If the content already exists, then you are ready to try it out!
Step 4: Contact the website owner. When you're ready to replace the page, use the broken link to contact the site owner and let them know of the issue. Offer your article as an alternative while doing your best to show that it fits the topic of your content. You'd be surprised how many website owners woo you - no one wants to publish an article with a bug.
Watch out for broken backlinks
The broken backlinks problem has affected nearly all sites at some point or another, presenting marketers with innovative link building opportunities. Be aware of these potential links that can have a huge impact on your campaign.