Building quality backlinks from relevant and credible websites to your own website may be the secret ingredient to ranking higher on Google. But how do you do it? There are a lot of strategies to get people to link back to your site. From our research, broken link building is one of the most effective—assuming you have the time it takes to dive deep into competitor sites.
What is broken link building?
According to Backlinko, it’s the practice of building backlinks by replacing links to 404 pages with a working link to a target website. Basically, it is the process of finding broken outbound links on a relevant site and offering related content from your site to take over the outbound link.
how do you find broken links?
Here is the most efficient way to find broken links.
1. Go on to a backlink evaluation platform (like SEMRush)
2. Input some relevant websites that have many backlinks—think content leaders in your industry.
3. Find their 404 pages and check to see if you have (or can create) a page with similar content to the broken page on their site.
Whatever tool you use, it’s important to check for ONLY 404 error pages. Usually there is a checkbox or dropdown to filter, making life easier.
offer your content to sites linking to the broken content
Once you find a page with a good number of backlinks where you have content you can offer, click on the number in the “Domains” column to view referring domains (this may vary by tool). These are websites linking to that content that no longer exists. Contact those websites and offer them your page to substitute.
And don’t forget—make sure the domain is relevant and credible! We want QUALITY backlinks.
For more information, check out Broken Link Building.