Broken link building is an essential SEO strategy. It involves creating content for dead links, including external links. Not everyone uses it, and a lot of website hosts miss out on the benefits of this strategy.
You can search the internet for broken links that no longer point anywhere. A website owner does not always pay attention to which of their links are broken. You can use this as an opportunity to create content for your site.
If you find a dead link, you can create content useful to people who click on it. Then, you can contact the website owner and ask them to link to the content you created.
They will probably appreciate this - you are helping them fix dead links that may annoy readers of their sites. You can also fix dead links on your own site, including internal links.
If you remove content from your site, links to your content on other websites will become dead links. If people continue to click on these links to your domain, you should replace the pages you deleted. Contact the owners of the sites that link to you and ask them to link to your new content.
How Does Broken Link Building Work?
As everyone knows, link building is vital for SEO. If you build active links to other websites, Google will notice this and rank your pages higher. The more often the links are used, the more they help your web pages rank higher.
If you want to take advantage of dead links on popular websites, you can use the following steps:
● First, find sites in the same niche as yours. If you are working on a health and fitness site, look for health and fitness sites that have broken links and are popular.
● Second, create content that people who would click on such a link would want to read. If the dead link is to a specific exercise or supplement, create a page about it. It is even better if you already have a page about that subject, but you will often have to create content.
● Third, send an email to the website host. Politely tell them that their link is broken and that there is content on your site that is useful to people who would click on that link. A lot of the time, they will thank you and link to your content.
If they don't answer you back, that is not the end of the world. Many of them will be interested; many others will not. Even if they do not email you back, you still have some new content for your page.
Broken Link Building Always Worked and Still Does
Google is always changing its algorithm. Major changes are announced, smaller changes are hidden. Hundreds of unequally weighted factors are used to rank websites.
This means that SEO tactics that worked a few years ago might no longer work today. However, broken link building still works. If you replace old content that other sites still link to, you will get more traffic and boost your site's visibility to search engines.
How to Find Sites with Dead Content?
If you know what you are doing, you can look for sites with dead links using the google search engine. There are commands you can type in to look for sites that may have dead content. First, enter a keyword and then enter a command that follows the keyword.
For example, if you are looking for sites about supplements, you could enter:
supplements "useful links"
supplements "useful resources"
supplements intitle:links
supplements intitle:resources
supplements inurl:resources
There are many of these commands, and they are crucial for anyone building content for broken links. These commands are known as advanced search operators.
Anyone involved in creating online content should use them and know about them in detail. There is a long list of commands, not only a few of them.
One of the most important search operators is inurl:resources. If you are looking for dead links about supplements, type in supplements inurl:resources and look for opportunities. Opportunities are easy to find: it is only creating new content for the links that takes time.
You Don't Have to Click on Every Link on a Site
Clicking on every link on a website to find broken links is time-consuming and unnecessary. You can use a google chrome plugin to look for broken links.
Quickly scan a site and abandon it if you don't find anything good. It won't take long to find good broken links on popular websites. Website hosts do not pay a lot of attention to broken links.
Make sure you type everything in the right way. If you type in a search operator wrong, it won't work.
This is right:
supplements inurl:resources
These two are wrong:
supplements inurl:"resources"
supplements inurl: resources
Don't add any unnecessary quotation marks or spaces. Make sure to use both advanced search operators and a link checker tool. You can find the link checker plugin here.
Will Other Business Owners be Interested?
Yes, there is a good chance that the other website owner will be interested in linking to your new content. Contact them and point out that some of their links no longer work and that you have new, similar pages that they should link to instead.
They do not want broken links on their site - broken links may annoy people who use their websites. Two website hosts can mutually benefit by sharing links with each other. By reaching out to businesses that linked to you before, you can build trust and connections.
Rebuild Something Similar to What the Link Pointed to Before
A website owner might not want to link to an article that they don't like. It should not be vastly different from what the link pointed to before. Merely being an article on the same subject might not be good enough.
There are many online archives of websites that no longer exist. You can use one of these archive tools to find the old website and then copy it.
While you don't need to spend a huge amount of time on the content you create, it should be reasonably good. Add a few images, add a few links, check for mistakes. The website owner won't want to link to obviously bad content.
After creating the content, the last step is to reach out to the business owner. This is not difficult - a short and simple email with no real flaws is good enough. It does not even have to be ten sentences long.
Fix Dead Links and Dead Pages on Your Website Also
Internal links matter. Use dead link tools to look for dead links within your website. Either make the links point somewhere else or remove them.
When you delete a page on your site, you often delete a page that other sites link to. This is a waste of traffic to your site.
If no one ever linked to the page you deleted, you might just let it die. However, if people are still trying to access that page, replace it with something similar. Don't waste the potential traffic.
What are Some Other Ways to Use Links for SEO Purposes?
To build links, you might write articles for other sites and link to content on your site. Or, you might directly contact businesses and ask to share links with them. You do not have to know the business owner first - if you have similar content, an e-mail might be enough.
Sometimes, a website might mention your business without linking to it. In that case, reach out to them and ask to share links. You can also use social media to build links.
Broken link building is an important part of your overall link-building strategy. Everyone needs a link building strategy if they want to succeed at SEO. The traffic on your website might increase quite noticeably after you replace content for broken links.
What are Some Other Useful Tools?
Xenu Link Sleuth is a great tool if you want to find out about sites that link to deleted pages on your site. Xenu Link Sleuth is easy to use. If you enter an external site's address, Xenu Link Sleuth will analyze it and look for broken links to your domain.
It takes a bit of time for the software to analyze the site, but it works very well. After you find the sites that link to dead pages on your website, replace the content and reach out to the website owners.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics to find broken links within your site. It is easy to end up with broken links to internal content if you delete any pages. Working internal links are also good for SEO, and broken internal links make your business look unprofessional.
Both Google Analytics and Xenu give you detailed reports about broken links on your site. You can see what links don't work and how much traffic finds these broken links.
Fixing broken links takes a bit of time. When you find links that may not be working with your analytical tools, you have to test each link yourself. The tools make it a lot easier, but they don't do the job for you.
Not every broken link is the same. Sometimes, a link doesn't work simply because someone mistyped a URL. This is not the same as a formerly good link that now points to a page that no longer exists.
Other broken links work and are clicked on frequently. Make them point to content the user would want to see.
You don't have to redirect all of your links manually. You can use a content management system (CMS) to do this. The CMS will give you a list of links on your website and let you redirect them from there.
Again, don't be afraid to reach out to other website hosts. Other people want to do everything they can to make their content rank higher, and they may be happy to trade links with you. They want links already on their website to point somewhere useful to their readers.
COMMENTS