Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building is another technique that SEO specialists use discreetly – it’s also one of the helpful ones. Why not, when you’re trying to fix a webmaster’s broken link for him?

Broken possibilities

There are lots of things that can happen in the web. A lot of possibilities why a site will go down and incur a ’404 Not Found’ status. Shift happens. And the web is full of it.

Once a site goes down, the links that point to it are immediately invalidated – they become broken links. Not every webmaster is notified when a site they are linking to goes down. The good thing is, you can do the job for them!

The trick behind Broken Link building

First you have to look for sites which might have broken links. You can start off with this type of query in the Google search box:

site:.edu intitle:”Your Niche” -inurl:pdf -inurl:doc -inurl:ppt

What this advanced search query does is find you all the results about “Your Niche” and remove all results that are .pdf, .doc, and .ppt – because we want to focus on webpages where we can get links from. Once you’ve compiled a good list of websites, you can start checking each website with either Xenu Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog.

The results of Xenu and Screaming Frog will show you clearly which of the links have a 404 Not Found status. Checking where that 404 Not Found points to using Webarchive.org’s Wayback Machine can give you an idea what that webpage was about.

Other methods of finding broken links would be:

For Firefox users: You can download Linkchecker to highlight broken links in a webpage that you’re browsing.

For Chrome users: You can download Check My Links Chrome extension to automatically tell you whenever there’s a broken link in a webpage that you’re in.

These methods however, will require you to go through each webpage of the website in order for you to check out all of the possible broken links inside the website. It’s really faster if you use Xenu or Screaming Frog.

via seo-hacker.com

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