What is Broken Link Building; and how it Works

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Broken link building is an effective white hat strategy that involves content focused link building through searching broken links, and by recreating these broken links/ content to generate more organic traffic.  As the modernization comes into the SEO world, broken link building has become one of the most reliable link recreation mechanism. Link building for the broken website links isn’t a new strategy. With the explosive growth of web development field and SEO, it has become necessary for the webmaster to analyze broken links related to their site, and recreate the content in a way to get more links as they are getting from the recently posted content. It’s not an easy thing to find broken links of a site. Normally, SEO professionals use broken links checker tool to evaluate the broken links of their site in order to work on them to achieve more competitive results. You can use this article as a guide to rectify the quantity of your website’s broken link, and how you can address this problem to achieve desired SEO goals.

“A broken link is just like the dead investment that you have to made earlier but now it didn’t provide the benefits as it was supposed to deliver” H-A

Start the process by Finding Dead Links

The first step you have to take when you decide to start a broken link building campaign is to find out the dead links. Usually, we recommend webmasters to use three different ways of finding dead links so as to achieve the hundred percent probability of success after implementing this strategy. It’s essential to find out the broken links at the first stage otherwise you can’t be able to achieve success in your rebuilding plans. Here are the three major kinds of broken links strategies.

Web resource targeted with keywords Web resource targeted at URLs Finding dead links by using direct URLs mechanism

Keyword Based Broken Link Building

Keyword-based broken link building is recognized among the most common and result oriented link recreation strategy. The process includes the Google search for keywords relevant to your site's products and services and then finding broken linked resource pages that have content related to your main keywords. Once you have recognized your keyword, you can easily pair them with new content phrases. These are searches to use a search engine to find relevant resources e.g. "intitle:resources" or "inurl: links. Normally the keyword-based method includes two different types of categories.

 

Categorically Relevant Keyword Method: This includes the search of broken links by searching category relevant keywords, and then finding out the content resource. Generally Broad Keyword Mechanism: This process of broken links finding includes the search of broken links by inserting the generic keywords related to your website.

The Link Extraction Process/ Detecting 404 Errors

After finding the exact amount of potential linking pages, you will have to start the process of link extraction by finding all 404s. You can perform this task by using domain hunter and check my list tool. It’s a most important and essential process during the rebuilding of broken links. Sometimes the page errors occur because of low-quality content. That happened due to the reason that you have to use any plagiarism checker tool at the time when you have posted the web content. Now, you can find out the actual quantity of error pages.

Perform Relevancy Analysis

Now is the time to go more in depth of the URL pages that you have detected as 404 errors. Select the most related content to recreate backlinks by addressing 404 errors. Must give preference to unique linking domains. Here are the ways through which you can determine the most relevant broken links to recreate these.

Using Way back machine to perform precise image search and content search of the old pages with broken links. Look URLs itself to get the idea of 404 errors. Evaluate the anchor text of the links directed towards the old pages.

Direct URL Targeting Method

It’s a kind of a modern but least scalable broken link building strategy. Unlike the previous approach where we are trying to find most possible broken content to replace and link to that broken content, here we already select a URL to whom we have to address for broken links by including new related content. I usually ask web professionals to first perform the previous plans, and in case if they don’t the required results, then they can shift to this category. Do also include the site crawling evaluation while you perform broken link building through targeting direct URLs.  You can use these following tools to get the problem solved.

Screaming Frog SEO: Screaming Frog helps webmasters to quickly diagnose a site from duplicate content and 404 errors. Xenu Link Sleuth: It’s a classical tool to find rectify any errors a site can have including broken links. Deep Trawl: It’s a great worthy tool for solving on site broken links errors.

Quality Content Publication to Rebuild Links

The next step in the broken link building strategy related with the creation of quality content that matches with the old broken pages. It’s vital to use a grammar checker tool while you write some sentences that you will submit to create new links. Most reliable tools that you can use to rebuild links are as follows.

Old Content Evaluation through Way Back Machine. Use of Majestic SEO's historical index to discover when the links were acquired. Getting help from Warrick tool to rebuild content that was previously blocked by robots.txt.

Moving Links Technique

Moving link method is the process to relink new keyword terms that are widely used to search for your business products and services. For example; Google has changed the name of their Google keywords tool to Google Keyword Planner, so it means that anyone who will search the tool with old name will not find the expected result. It’s like searching an old category/specs with outdated links. You need to rectify this problem, by adding the new search words relevant to your site in the place of old dated search terms. For e-commerce site owners its important to use this technique as they product search terms chances rapidly.

Conclusion

Backlinks generation is among the most valuable activity in SEO.  It’s a kind of expensive investment that we have to make immediately after the development of site. So, we should be take care of our old backlinks/ broken links. For webmasters this activity can really help to grow their SEO score in longer run. Well, you can get the benefit from above mentioned broken links strategies I have mentioned above whenever you find out that your site is experiencing broken links problem.