Sweep Away The Competition By Spring Cleaning Your Backlinks
March 30th, 2015 by
So you want to do link building the white-hat way, but it seems these days most link building practices are pretty sketchy. One Google-friendly way to do link building is through identifying and fixing broken backlinks to redirect to pages on your site. Spring backlink cleaning, here we come!
While there are many ways to approach broken link building, the method I find most doable is scanning relevant, authoritative sites for broken backlinks to pages for more info. Once you find a broken link and determine that a page on your site will adequately replace it, you’ll want to reach out to the owner of the site with the broken link to help them recognize the issue and take your opportunity.
This practice is best for businesses with sites that already serve as a resource and that have many informational pages regarding various aspects of their industry. It is, however, totally doable for businesses that don’t meet these ideals, but said businesses will have to build out resource pages on the identified subject areas as they identify broken link opportunities.
Finding Sites
So first, you’re going to have to find the best and most authoritative sites in your industry. Moz’s MozBar extension allows you to easily see Domain Authority and Page Authority of sites you’re on and sites in search results, which can be helpful in the hunt for good sites. Think of products and services that complement what your business offers to find more opportunities. For example, if I were trying to find a complementary business or service to Search Influence, the first type of business that comes to mind is a social reputation management service.
Once you find one or more authoritative reputation management sites, you could use them to find MORE opportunities! To do this, you could use Moz’s Open Site Explorer and find backlinks to the sites you’ve already found that are also authoritative and relevant to your industry. You can use any backlink-finding tools you prefer, though. Other tools that can do this include LinkResearchTools’ Quick Backlink Tool and Majestic’s Site Explorer.
Finding Broken Links
Once you’ve got the list of sites you’d like to scan for broken links (I’d suggest at least 20 to 30, but it’s up to you), you’ll need to find said broken links. Internally, we use a tool (Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider) to find broken links for all of your sites, but any tool you find will probably do the job just fine.
If you’re using Screaming Frog, you’d go to “Configuration,” then “Spider” to make sure your settings are set for an internal crawl. Enter the domain you want to crawl, and then click start. Once the crawl is complete, go to “Bulk Export,” then “All In Links.” Open the file, and we’re ready to get organized!
Since we only want links, the first header you’ll want to filter is “Type” to only show HREF. Then filter “Status Code” to show everything but 200s, since 200 links are O.K. Finally, sort the “Destination” column alphabetically so that you can easily see and prioritize rows with off-site destinations. The site owners are most likely to be willing to replace broken off-site links. They might prefer to fix rather than replace broken internally directing links.
Once you’ve followed the above steps for finding broken links on your chosen sites, we’re ready to take action.
Finding Opportunities
Here’s the tedious (but worth it) part of the whole process. Now that you’ve got lists of broken links, you’ll have to look through them and see if you can find the new page on that site that it should link to. If you can’t find the page and your site has links that will fulfill the objective of the original links, note that replacement link as one of yours instead of one on the original site. Sometimes this means looking at the “Source” column and checking out the context of the broken link. It also might mean creating content on your site, if it’s relevant to your business, to fulfill the needs of the broken link objective before moving forward.
The last thing you’ll need is a list for each site you’ve investigated that includes the page that has the broken link (“Source”), the broken external link (“Destination”), the fixed URL, and the corresponding page on your site that could replace the broken link or be added to that page.
Reaching Out
Once you’ve got your lists of opportunities organized, you can reach out to the site administrator to have the broken link(s) replaced with your good one(s). You can find contacts to sites in multiple ways. The obvious way would be by finding a contact email or form in their “About” or “Contact” pages. I like this option because most times, if a site has created a way for users to contact them on-site, they’re responding to outreach through these mediums. If you’re unable to find any obvious way to contact a site, you can also use a whois lookup. I use the terminal emulator iTerm2 to do whois lookups, but you can also just use a web hosted whois lookup like whois.domaintools.com to find an email for the site Admin or Registrar.
Here’s an example of a whois lookup for Wikipedia (You probably don’t even want to try to communicate with them, by the way. Possibly too big of a fish to fry.):
For time-saving purposes, I’d suggest creating a template you can use to email all of these prospects. In doing manual link removal requests in the past, I found some bits of information to be more fruitful to provide than others. You want to seem natural and authoritative (not spammy) while providing clear information, but you also want to be as concise as possible to avoid losing the attention of the receiver.
You’ll want to include a short intro to introduce your authority and what you do, say that your message is intended for the site’s webmaster (as they would be the one implementing your suggested fixes), and note the Source page, the broken Destination URL, and the recommended replacement URL. If the replacement URL is just one you found originally linked to the site, now is your opportunity to share that you might have some additional information on your site that their readers might benefit from. Send all your messages, and then wait!
While I’d say to make your own templates to sound more natural and fit your needs, here are two of mine for both use cases.
Replacing URL With Same-Site URL
Hi,
My name’s (insert name here), and I am an industry specialist and was doing some research when I landed on your site…
I was hoping to pass on some information to your webmaster or web developer, as I found a broken link on your site that your readers might need.
While looking at this page on your site (source URL), I clicked on the link to this site (broken destination URL) and found that it didn’t work.
Once on the site, I found that they must have moved that information here (replacement URL).
While you’re working on updating this page, I was wondering if you’d be interested in including my page about (insert summary of page here) as a resource that might also be beneficial to your readers: (insert link to your site’s relevant URL here).
Replacing URL With Your-Site URL
Hi,
My name’s (insert name here), and I am an industry specialist and was doing some research when I landed on your site…
I was hoping to pass on some information to your webmaster or web developer, as I found a broken link on your site that your readers might need.
While looking at this page on your site (source URL), I clicked on the link to this site (broken destination URL) and found that it didn’t work.
I tried finding the correct page on their site for this info, but it seems that it might be gone altogether.
My site happens to have some similar information, so I was wondering if you’d be interested in including my page about (insert summary of page here) as a resource that might also be beneficial to your readers: (insert link to your site’s relevant URL here).
Hopefully, this helpful, good link building practice will aid in your efforts. Let us know your favorite, white-hat link building practice in the comments!
