Is Broken Link-Building Effective In 2023: The Answer Is No. Experts Explain Why

Is Broken Link-Building Effective In 2023 - getmentioned

The quest to get backlinks on your website and increase web traffic can be daunting.

Convincing competitors to offer them a guest post can take months. Sometimes it comes with stringent conditions. This is why alternatives like broken link building exist.

Navigation

What is Broken Link-Building?
How to Replace a Broken Link: Step-by-Step Plan.
Do We Use Broken Link-Building at Getmentioned?
Disadvantages of Broken Link-Building
What Methods Can Replace Broken Link-Building?
FAQs
Summary
TL;DR

What is Broken Link-Building?

Broken Link building is one of the easy methods of getting backlinks to your site.

It involves searching for dead links from other websites and offering to replace those dead links with your own articles.

It is a win-win situation.

The blog webmasters get to reduce the number of broken links they have, and you get to have a backlink to your website to increase your web traffic.

However, it is not always easy to start searching for dead links on another person’s website.

What is Broken Link-Building - getmentioned

The chances of getting a response to the request of offering a replacement for dead links are slim.

Mervin Lance, an SEO consultant, affirms that most webmasters are often immune to the request of offering a replacement for dead links.

Thus, we need to ask a salient question:

Is broken link-building still effective in 2023?

What Are Broken Links?

Broken link building is a white hat SEO link-building strategy that involves finding broken links on other websites.

These rot pages can be:

  • inactive websites,
  • error 404 pages,
  • redirected page different from the resources the web owner recommends.

Matthew Ramirez, a serial entrepreneur and a Forbes 30 under 30 alumni gave another use for broken link building from his own personal experience.

“I use broken link-building to identify sites that have pages that link to mine but have broken links. I can then reach out to those sites and ask them to fix the links”.

How to Replace a Broken Link: Step-by-Ste Plan

There is no doubt that you will find one or two of your competitors that have a broken link on their website.

These steps will guide you in reaching out to them and getting them to replace their broken link with yours.

1. Find broken links in competitors’ websites

The first step is to search for websites with broken pages. To get websites with broken pages.

Here’s your plan:

1. Go to Site Explorer.

Find broken links in competitors' websites - getmentioned

2. Enter a competing domain.

competing domain - getmentioned

3. Go to the Broken backlinks section.

Broken backlinks section - getmentioned

4. And here is their “404 not found” page.

Broken backlinks - getmentioned

2. Create content for the broken link

Creating quality content is a sure way to get the attention of webmasters to replace their broken links with yours.

Create content for the broken link - getmentioned

To create quality content,

  • Conduct in-depth research on the topic,
  • Write compelling headlines
  • Create lists in the article to make it more readable, and use simple words.
  • Include lots of useful information
  • Include links from authoritative sites , and
  • Use best SEO practices.

3. Reach out to the webmaster

Send a mail indicating the link that is broken in their website.

Include your replacement for the broken link as an attachment.

Do We Use Broken Link-Building at Getmentioned?

No, we don’t use broken link-building tactics at Getmentioned.

Broken link-building tactics limit you from exploring other link-building opportunities and take time to find relevant website broken pages for our SEO goal.

Here are disadvantages of the following link-building , method we take into account:

  1. You waste lots of time in the process of finding a relevant website.
  2. Creating an outreach email for webmasters
  3. You target older & uncrawled dead pages.

We use effective link-building tactics like HARO, Guest posting, and Outreach.

Link building tactic How it works
Guest posting Guest posting is simply creating content on other blogs relevant to your niche, with a link back to your own website, and aiming to reach a wider audience.
HARO HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out. It is an online service that helps to connect high-authority publications and expert sources with bloggers.
It has a huge tendency to boost your site’s SEO and increase traffic.
Authority links This simply involves getting backlinks from high quality and relevant authority in your niche.
This can take weeks, if you do it alone. But at Getmentioned, we have automated the process for you.Just reach out to us and we’ll get it done for you.
Editorial linking This implies publishing your content in large and popular editorials. It may be hard to do this, but with our Editorial linking service – it is easy.

Disadvantages of Broken Link-Building

1. Conflict of interest between your site and the site with broken links

This happens when you share the same interest with the host site.

For example, if your niche is skin care, and it’s the same with the host site.

There is a tendency that your prospective leads might stay more on the host site than clicking the link that leads to your site.

2. Broken links are old, and Google hasn’t crawled for a while

Broken links are not usually crawled by Google, which reduces their chances of getting ranked.

For example, if you have a high performing link that gets broken, the link’s ranking will definitely drop, because it can’t be crawled again.

Although replacing the broken link will fix this, it will take some time before it gets ranked again.

3. It is time-consuming

Jamie, an SEO Director at Straight Up Search noted that for broken link building, “not only do you have to search through hundreds of websites for broken links, you need to also start checking if they are available for replacement”.

Thus, the process takes a lot of time.

4. There are better alternatives

There are better alternatives to create link-building opportunities.

Creating a fresh blog post on a fresh link and building it from scratch will give long-lasting results than finding broken links.

What Methods Can Replace Broken Link-Building?

You can leverage tools like HARO to create linkable content on your website, an authority link-building, or a guest posting.

Reach out to us today to help you with any of these options.

Should I Use Broken Link Building?

It depends.

Normally, we do not recommend you use a broken link-building strategy alone.

You can use it alongside other link-building strategies.

Matthew, the founder of Rephrasely, a company that developed AI applications to help writers and journalists, gave a pro tip:

“Use broken link-building to identify sites that have pages that link to mine but have broken links. I can then reach out to those sites and ask them to fix the links”.

FAQS

What is a broken link in SEO?

A broken link is a link to a page that no longer works. This could be because the page has been deleted or updated and no longer fit the resources.

Does Getmentioned use broken-link?

We do not use broken link building.

Instead, we use other quality and proven techniques like:

Will broken link building be effective in 2023

No, it won’t. Times are changing, and the SEO game is changing also.

Google updates its algorithm every month.

It would be much harder to leverage a link that has remained uncrawled for a long time for ranking.

Also, Jamie, the Director of Straight Up Search said:

“It is becoming hard to convince webmasters to grant requests of broken link building as they have seen multiple iterations over the years, so, their receptivity towards it is dwindling”.

You should explore other options or hire a link-building agency to help you build a solid link-building strategy.

What shall I use instead of broken link-building?

Mervin Lance, an SEO professional with over 5 years of experience, said well-researched content, PR (public relations/ editorial content) and HARO are great options in place of broken link building.

A well-researched content will attract the right audience to your website. And if you doubt how to create good content on other people’s websites, or use the HARO technique, then you need to check out our services.

Summary

Broken link-building is a great link-building tactic. However, you cannot totally depend on it for your link-building campaign. You can either use it alongside other strategies or use it sparingly to save time. 2023 is here, and it would be hard to rank off broken pages.

TL;DR

Here are reasons why broken link building will no longer be effective in 2023

  1. Conflict of interest between your site and the site with broken links.
  2. Contextual difference between your site and the target site.
  3. Broken links are dead, and Google doesn’t crawl dead links.
  4. Broken Link building is time-consuming.
  5. There are better alternatives to broken link building.
Viktoria Medvedko

Author at Getmentioned

Viktoria Medvedko is a passionate marketer and Founder of Getmentioned. Before launching a link building service in 2019, Viktoria worked on Upwork as a link building freelancer, helped 100+ clients to scale traffic and rankings with the help of effective link-building methods. She took experience and turned into dedicated Link Building Agency with a goal to reduce the stress of traffic growth from fellow marketers. Right now, Getmentioned, originally, Ukrainian based, is a team of 10+ link building experts from all parts of the world. In her free time she enjoys biking and occasionally skiing.

Connect with Viktoria Medvedko on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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