In the game of SEO in 2019, search engines call the shots.

And if you’re not constantly aware of their changing rules and algorithms, you’re playing to lose. This article will teach you everything you need to know about ranking higher with broken link building.

Whether your website is populated with broken links or you barely have any links at all, this guide will show you how to take advantage of the broken links on your sites and most importantly, the broken links on high ranking sites.

To begin, let’s answer these few questions.

Exactly what are broken links?

What are internal broken links?

What are external or outbound broken links?

How do broken links affect your SEO?

What are broken Links?

Broken links are links that send the “webpage no longer exists” or the “404 error” message to your visitors.

Broken backlinks can happen for a few reasons:

The linked content has been removed

The page URL of the linked content was changed

The domain of the linked content was changed

A survey conducted by SEOPressor shows that the one thing that annoys visitors the most on websites are broken links.

What are internal broken Links?

Internal Links are links that go from one page on your website to another. An internal broken link is a link that leads from one page on your website to an error 404 page. Internal links can be fixed by simply finding out all the links that are broken on your page and either fixing or deleting them.

What are external/ outbound broken Links?

External or outbound links are links on your website that lead to other websites. They’re usually used when referencing another person’s research, article or quote.

External broken links are more dangerous than internal ones because they are primarily out of your control. A blog post you cited months ago can be taken down at any time without your knowledge.

The broken link building process is more concerned with external/ outbound broken links.

How do broken links make you rank lower?

When your website visitors excitedly click a link to solve a problem they have and they are greeted by an “error 404” message, they’re almost always too disappointed and annoyed to continue to other pages on your site.

And when visitors spend lesser time on your site, search engines will assume that your website is not providing a good user experience to the visitors. Eventually, search engines will give you a lower rank.

Now that we understand what broken links are, the two kinds of broken links and how they affect your website, let’s explain what broken link building is and the best way to implement it in 2019.

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is simply finding dead outbound links on your website, notifying the publisher about the broken link, and providing them with a replacement link that leads back to your site.

Publishers of high ranking publications are always happy to get replacement links on their sites because they care about their reader’s experience and also have to Google’s algorithms.

How to implement a broken link building strategy in 2019

The three core components of broken link building are

Finding broken backlinks Creating replacement content Reaching out to publishers

How to find broken backlinks

Not every broken backlink offers the same amount of utility to your website. A broken link from a high-ranking website that offers a service related to your business would be a better pick than a random website that has a broken link you discovered.

So, to make the best of this link building strategy, you need to be able to

Know the best places to find broken backlinks to replace

Know how to find these backlinks.

The best places to offer backlink replacements to are:

Sites that your audience regularly visits

Websites that link to your competitors

On high-authority websites

To find similar sites that your audience visits regularly, you can use Alexa’s overlap tool. This tool helps you find competitor sites, run a competitive analysis, and uncover ways to get in front of your audience.

To use this tool, enter your website URL and/or the URLs of up to 10 competitors who have the audience you want to attract.

After you’ve entered the sites, the tool will produce a map with dozens of sites that share a similar audience to the sites you entered.

You can then use this data to identify top sites to target for broken link building, as you know your ideal audience uses these sites.

Note:

Always remember to save your list so you can use it when finding broken competitor links.

After generating your list of websites that have the kind of audience you’d like to attract to yours, you need to qualify them by how high they rank.

How to find high authority sites.

A link on a site with high authority will create more SEO value than any random site.

You can know the authority of any website by checking its Alexa Rank.

Alexa Rank is a measure of a website’s popularity, with respect to other sites on the web. Sites with a high Alexa Rank (ex. 100,000) have less authority than sites with a low Alexa Rank (ex. 100). The site with an Alexa Rank of one is the most authoritative site online.

You can view a site’s Alexa Rank using the Site Comparison Tool. Enter the site URL to see its Global Rank as well as its ranking in your own location.

How to check for broken backlinks

Once you identify sites that would be good places to build links, you can use a broken link checker to see if there are any dead links on each site.

You can check for broken backlinks with tools like Dead Link Checker and Dr. Link Checker.

After finding the broken links you’d like to replace for a publication, the next step is convincing them to accept your replacement link.

How to get publishers to accept your replacement link.

Create relevant content.

These publishers didn’t ask you to create replacement links for them, so you whatever content or resource you want them to replace their broken link with needs to be topnotch and very useful to their audience.

Create valuable content.

The content managers of the publications you’re pitching your replacement content to know that linking to low-quality content can decrease their site’s online authority and SEO. So, they will link back to your content if the quality is very high.

This means that a short, low-quality blog post may not be good enough. Create content that will impress publishers while also serving as strong SEO content for your site.

After creating relevant and valuable content, the next and final step of this broken link building strategy is reaching out to content managers and editors of these publications.

For this, you can use tools and platforms like Linkedin, ViolaNorbert, Hunter, etc. to find their emails and contact information.

In conclusion,

These tips will help you implement an excellent broken link building strategy when performed the right way. If you need help with Creating and Implementing a successful broken link building strategy or any other SEO and link building services, we can help.

You can contact SEO POW now by clicking here.