Getting quality backlinks is key for your website to climb positions in search engines. There are many ways to earn links to your site.
What are broken links and why should you avoid them?
Broken links are links that do not work. It may be that the page you were going to no longer exists or there is an error in the URL. This will cause the user to go to a 404 error page when clicking on the link.
Nobody wants broken links on their website. Although there are two different cases, both affect the user experience and impact the authority of the site. On the other hand, if your website is free of broken links, it will be better seen by Google and the rest of the search engines.
Doing good link building is getting quality links , which help you boost the authority of the site. Every link you get tells search engine robots that your website is useful. Considering you have information that others consider of quality. And the bots will reward you with a better ranking on the web.
SEO specialists master different practices to get backlinks that benefit them. Among the most recognized tactics we find taking advantage of the broken links of the competition. Spying on your competitors, knowing how they do link building and where their inbound links come from will be effective to improve your web ranking.
It is a practice that requires time and a well-defined strategy. But, it is worth implementing because you could get quite a few links.
What is link building with broken links?
To learn more about this practice, let’s define what is link building with broken links . It consists of finding the backlinks of the competition that do not work. Then, create content on the same topic and tell the owner of the website where the damaged link is that they can replace it with your content.
This is roughly what this tactic is all about. There are different ways to take advantage of it and many tools available to help you do so. But finding the “dead” pages is time consuming. And that is only the first step, then you have to convince the site to change the link, you will not always succeed.
Despite that, it is worth a try. Most of the website owners are willing to replace the broken links. And if you have the answer in your hands, why not try it.
How to do link building with broken links from your competition
Surely at some point you have clicked on a link that does not work and it directs you to an error page. As a user, it bothers you that you have wasted your valuable time. As an SEO specialist you are faced with the opportunity to earn a link. However, it is not as easy as finding broken links by chance.
You will need time and dedication to find the broken backlinks of the competition. If you want to take advantage of this type of SEO forum strategies, you have to follow a plan that suits your needs.
Here are some methods you can apply to take advantage of these broken links. The first step is to learn to identify them and then you will contact the sites where the hyperlinks are not working.
Find broken links on sites in your niche
Broken links pointing to your competitors’ sites are a great opportunity to get backlinks.
The first thing you should do is identify who your competition is and make a list with the address of each Digitalmarketing agency website. You then analyze each of the sites for broken links. Tools like Ahrefs, Screaming Frog or W3C Link Checker will allow you to see backlinks on a page .
You will have to analyze the links on each website one by one to find the pages that give an error. You can also find how many broken links each of these pages have. All of these are opportunities that you have, they can reach hundreds if it is a very competitive niche. Based on these choose the ones that are most relevant to work with.
Then explore among your content a similar resource, on the same topic, to offer it to the site where the link is. If you don’t have anything like that, then you can create the content.
What if you have the address of the link but don’t know what it is about? On many occasions the same URL can give you a start on the topic, but other times it doesn’t tell you anything. On sites like the Wayback Machine , websites such as Dubai SEO company are archived and there you could see what the page was about. Another option is to go to the SEO tools to find out the anchor text you used.
Take advantage of broken outbound links on websites in your niche
In addition to analyzing the links that point to other sites in your niche, you can also identify where they link. If you work on creating quality resources, which are valuable even to your competitors, you can include them in your link building strategies .
This is about finding the links that your competition has linked to and that no longer work. If the site has a good authority and is known in the sector, you may want to link your website there. It is a way to gain visibility and reach another audience interested in your niche.
Once you find the broken links, make a list of the ones you want to replace. It should be noted that not all of them will serve your purpose, so you have to identify which ones represent a real opportunity to get a backlink.
The rest of the work is similar to the previous step: create content and write to the competition to link to your site.
Another way to take advantage of this analysis is to take one of the broken links that interests you, analyze them to find other sites that have been linked to that page. When you have identified them you can contact them.
Get links through expired domains
This method requires more work than the previous ones. You should also pay close attention to make sure you choose a domain that suits you. When a domain expires you have the opportunity to claim it and redirect it to your own site.
The key is to identify expired domains that belong to your niche. There are those who apply this technique even if the domain issue has nothing to do with their own site. Avoid this link building technique. They may indeed be gaining some backlinks, but they won’t be quality. If a user comes through anchor texts that have nothing to do with the theme they are looking for, they will most likely leave. And that is not suitable for any website either.
So what you need to do is research which domains in your niche have expired. You can find them through tools like Expired Domains.net.
This is also not the only way to take advantage of expired domains. After identifying them, you can analyze them and see what inbound links they have. There you will have many other options to get backlinks for your website .
How to ask to link to your site?
After identifying which links you can “steal” from the competition, you have to contact the web where they are. Your duty is to try to convince them to link to your site.
They will usually be willing to do it because, as we mentioned, no one wants broken links on their site. However, you won’t always have positive responses. So, of all the links you identify, you may only get some of them to work. But, even if they are few, they are worth it.
To send an effective email, identify who is the correct person to whom you should send the email. Don’t send it to anyone on the team. On many sites such as personal blogs or small business websites it is easy to identify the recipient. For example, knowing the name of the person you want to reach, you can find their email on social networks.
There are others where it is more complicated. But, again, on the Internet there are tools that will help you find the email of the people you are looking for. In this case you can use Buzzstream or something similar. However, in these cases you must be very attentive to the results. In the lists they produce, you will not always have the addresses you are looking for.
In the email you send you must identify yourself, inform them of the broken link and where it is. Then it suggests that I replace it with the link that you indicate. Now we just have to wait for him to respond. If he doesn’t or you notice that he hasn’t replaced the link, contact him again and remind him of your suggestion.
Tools to identify links that do not work
There are tools on the Internet that will help you identify hyperlinks that have stopped working. Here we mention some that will be useful to you.
Ahrefs . It is a fairly complete tool and offers a lot of information about the site you are analyzing. It will help you identify your competitors, know the domain authority, incoming and outgoing links, broken links, anchor texts, etc.
Majestic SEO . This is another popular resource when it comes to link building. With this you know the quality of the links and it will help you to know the theme of a URL.
Screaming Frog . Shows all links in a URL. In the results list it shows you the status of each page, you should look for the ones that appear as 404.
Xenu’s link Sleuth . It is an easy to understand tool. The database is constantly updated and serves to know the broken links that the competition has.
W3C Link Checker . The process is simple, you just have to enter the URL you want to analyze and then see which ones have 404 errors. To analyze the results well you will need some technical knowledge.
Check My Links . It is a Google Chrome extension. It is quite easy to use, but you will have to analyze page by page. It will show you the number of invalid links and it will highlight them in red so that you can identify it. Then you will have to check if it is a 404 error. This will take a lot of time, making it somewhat tedious.
Find broken links with Google
With a Google search you can also start finding invalid links in the competition. The search engine will help you identify the pages where you could use link building. But then you will have to use one of the tools we mentioned to find outgoing links that do not work.
What you can do with the search engine is advanced search, with specific terms, to find the topics that interest you. For example, if you want to search for the keyword “escapes the Caribbean” on travel blogs, you can do the following search:
inurl travel blogs: escapes to the caribbean ”intitle:” escapes to the caribbean ”
Among the results, identify the pages that interest you and analyze them as mentioned above.
You already know how to link building with the broken links of the competition. If you prefer to leave this task in the hands of professionals, contact us and ask for a free estimate.
