Broken Link Building: Turning Errors into Opportunities
In SEO, broken link building is a tactic where you can turn errors into more opportunities!
The process would involve requesting the webmaster to replace irrelevant or outdated links with a newly created source that is more high-quality. This would improve your backlink portfolio, which would positively impact your SEO performance. So, in this article, you will learn how to turn your broken link building from a negative aspect into a positive one!
Understanding Broken Links
Broken links negatively impact your SEO performance because they have no intended end. Thus, they can lead to 404 pages that make your website look less credible. There are two types of broken links: internal and external.
- Internal Broken Links: Links that are within the same page.
- External Broken Links: Links that are from different websites.
Moving forward, it would help if you also learned the common causes of broken links to address them.
Common Causes of Broken Links
Indeed, broken links can occur for various reasons, and sometimes it’s out of your control. Fortunately, you can fix them if you know the common causes. The common causes are deleted or moved content, typographical errors, and domain changes. These can have a URL or link without proper redirection, making them broken links.
How can Broken Links impact your SEO?
Broken links frustrate online users. If they are redirected to blank pages, the bounce rate can increase, potentially causing you to lose interest from potential clients or customers. Broken links can also make your website look less credible and trustworthy. Therefore, it’s crucial to regularly check for and fix broken links on your website.
👉 Direct Impacts on SEO
- Reduced Crawl Efficiency: Search engines rely on links to navigate your site. Broken links hinder this process, making it less efficient for them to index your pages.
- Lower PageRank: Broken internal links can prevent “link juice” from flowing effectively throughout your site, affecting page authority and rankings.
- Negative User Experience: Users encountering broken links are frustrated, leading to higher bounce rates and lower time on site. These metrics are crucial for SEO.
- Damaged Reputation: A website with numerous broken links can be perceived as poorly maintained and less trustworthy.
👉 Indirect Impacts on SEO
- Lost Link Equity: Broken external links can lead to lost link equity, as the linking website’s authority is no longer transferred to your site.
- Keyword Rankings Decline: Due to decreased crawl efficiency and negative user experience, your keyword rankings might suffer.
In essence, broken links create a domino effect: poor user experience, lower search engine visibility, and potential loss of trust. To maintain optimal SEO, it’s crucial to regularly check for and fix broken links.
Benefits of Broken Link Building
Broken link building can be more successful because you are also solving web admins and fixing issues on their websites. So, you can say that it’s a win-win situation for your website and your relationship with other industry experts.
Nonetheless, here are the benefits of broken link building you should know.
1. Enhancing SEO Performance
Broken link building is about replacing broken links with a better one that can help you gain quality backlinks. As a result, you will also enhance your SEO performance because backlinks are one of the major components to help you rank in the digital landscape. When you rank higher, you will gain more visibility and increase your organic search! Replacing broken links with updated and relevant links can help your business achieve its goals.
2. Improving User Experience
As said above, broken links lead to blank pages, which can frustrate your online users. To avoid this, you must check your broken links to improve user experience! Removing broken links can provide a more seamless navigational experience on your website. Online users can click links that redirect to essential pages to convert their actions into sales or support.
3. Establishing Authority and Credibility
Backlinks are known to be the vote of confidence, so replacing broken links can make your website look more credible and trustworthy. Since you are replacing low-quality broken links, you will be able to use relevant links that can positively impact your SEO performance and backlink portfolio. This can also help establish authority and credibility within your industry expert.
4. Cost-Effectiveness Compared to Other Link-Building Strategies
Indeed, broken link building is more cost-effective because you have to replace or update existing content. You can also use this opportunity to make your content more relevant. After all, creating new content from scratch takes more time and cost, so broken link building allows you to maximize your existing content for better SEO performance.
How to Identifying Broken Links ?
Before you gain the benefits of broken link building, you must first learn how you can identify broken links so you can fix them.
1. Tools and Methods for Finding Broken Links
- Manual Search: This method can be time-consuming because you have to check websites manually and see broken links that lead to your website. Now, after checking all the broken links manually, collate them in a single file so you can contact the webmaster to replace the broken links, It could be a better process if you are doing a full-blown backlink audit. However, this can be beneficial for small-scale link building.
- Online SEO Tools (e.g., Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog): Fortunately, you can use SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Screaming Frog to help you identify broken links. These tools make the process more convenient because you can turn broken links into opportunities to acquire more high-quality backlinks.
Using SEO tools is also advisable if you’re conducting a backlink audit to assess the health of your backlink profile.
Browser Extensions: Another thing you can try is using browser extensions like Check My Links or LinkMiner to scan broken links on your website quickly. Remember that using browser extensions is more applicable if you’re checking internal links because you need SEO tools for full-scale backlink audits, including external links.
2. Prioritizing broken links for maximum impact
After identifying the broken links, it’s also important to prioritize which links you need to fix first for maximum impact. It’s advisable to fix links based on these three criteria:
- Niche Relevance: You must prioritize the links relevant to your niche because you can also get referral traffic.
- Source Authority Score: Your authority score can also pass some link juice to your website, so make sure to prioritize links from credible websites to ensure valuable backlinks.
- Traffic Potential: It’s also essential to check the link source’s traffic potential to increase traffic and digital visibility.
5 Effective Ways To Use Broken Link Building Strategy
As you proceed with the actual broken link building process, here are some effective tips for making your broken link tactics more successful.
1. Analyzing and Choosing Opportunities
To make your broken link building more successful, you need to evaluate the quality of broken links to determine their values. You should also check the domain authority and relevance of the links to determine which to prioritize.
After this, you can create a list of the websites where you found your broken links and strategize to turn these into opportunities. You can also identify relevant and high-authority sites to know where you can get more traffic.
To summarize, here are the three steps you need to follow:
- Evaluating the quality of broken links
- Create a list of target websites
- Identifying relevant and high-authority sites
2. Creating Valuable Content
Since you will need to replace broken links, it’s also essential to include them in your strategy to create valuable content. Also, remember to follow the E-E-A-T guidelines when creating your content to make it relevant and credible.
Work with your team to develop content to replace broken links. You can also conduct a content gap analysis to determine which content needs some updates to improve its quality.
Content Formats
Another thing to consider is the content format. You can change some content to other formats to make it more engaging. For instance, you can transform the article into a video because TikTok videos effectively capture your audience’s attention.
Here are some content formats you can make:
- Articles or Blog Posts
- Infographics
- Guest Post Articles
- Video Content like Shorts
- Podcasts
- Visual Content like Social Media Post
3. Outreach Strategy
Another way to replace these broken links is to communicate with webmasters or email outreach.
Your outreach strategy can affect how you develop professional relationships with other industry experts. So, it’s important to know how to make your email outreach more professional, friendly, and respectful.
You can craft personalized outreach messages while ensuring the grammar is correct, the tone is respectful and professional, and finally, you include all the essential information.
Extra Tip 👉 To maximize your email outreach efforts, you also need to learn about follow-up techniques and best practices. Keep your follow-up message polite and concise, and send it at the right time after a week or two.
4. Build and Maintain Relationships
Finally, the webmaster replied, and of course, you need to build and maintain relationships to have more opportunities in the future!
Since broken link building is about helping each other, webmasters will appreciate your efforts in providing high-quality links that can improve your SEO performance while improving the webmaster’s website.
Extra Tip 👉 To have an amiable working relationship, be more proactive in engaging with the webmaster, like sharing their blogs or social media posts.
5. Implementing and Tracking Results
Finally, it’s also essential to implement and track the results of the replaced links to know whether they positively affect your SEO performance. You can use SEO tools to describe how well these links work accurately.
After getting the data and statistics from these tools, you can readjust your strategy to make your broken link building more successful.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them…
There will also be challenges when doing your broken link building strategies, but don’t let these stop you from effectively fixing the broken links. So, here’s how you can overcome common challenges:
1. Dealing with Unresponsive Webmasters
Only some webmasters will reply to your emails; this can be stressful because it’s out of control. If they didn’t answer, it’s better to disavow links to prevent them from negatively affecting your website.
- How to Overcome the Problem 👉 You can still send follow-up emails to notify them about the broken links. You can send personalized messages or highlight the benefit of fixing broken links to increase the number of replies.
2. Handling Content Rejection
Rejecting content for the replaced broken links can happen. However, don’t feel discouraged when this happens because you can always revise and edit your content.
- How to Overcome the Problem 👉 Politely ask the webmaster about what you need to change in your content. Perhaps you need to improve your SEO guidelines adherence or add word count. Nonetheless, be open to suggestions to improve the content.
3. Keeping Up with Ongoing Maintenance
Regularly checking the ongoing maintenance and backlink quality can be overwhelming. Hence, you might need to look into some tasks or steps in your broken link building strategies. Fortunately, you can still fix this problem.
- How to Overcome the Problem 👉 Create a better schedule for your tasks and ask for assistance from your teammates. Let them know if you need help with your work, and practice more organized task management to make your broken link building process more efficient.
Turning Errors Into Opportunities
In SEO, you can always turn errors into opportunities, especially in link building. All you have to do is follow a process where you can replace broken links with high-quality, relevant links. If you want to start your broken link building process, use this article as a guide to help you improve your SEO performance.
In case you missed!
