Broken link building: get backlinks by helping others

---

Why change the outreach dynamic

Most outreach emails start by asking for something. "Can you link to my article?" "Can you publish my guest post?" "Can you mention my tool?" The recipient reads the email, identifies that you are asking for a favor, and decides whether it is worth their time.

Broken link building inverts that dynamic. Your first contact with the webmaster is to do them a favor: you let them know they have a broken link on their page. A link that hurts their readers' experience and that, if it has been there for months, they probably did not know about.

After that heads-up, and only after, you mention that you have a piece of content that could work as a replacement. You are not asking for a link. You are offering a solution to a problem you yourself identified.

That completely changes how the other person receives the email. You are not someone asking for something. You are someone who helped first.

How to find broken links

There are several ways, from most manual to most automated.

Check My Links extension (Chrome). The most direct. You install the extension, visit a web page relevant to your niche, and it highlights all broken links in red. Browse resource pages, tool lists, "best X for Y" articles, and any page that links to lots of external content. Those are the pages that accumulate the most broken links over time.

Ahrefs, Backlinks report. Enter the domain of a relevant site into Ahrefs, go to the "Backlinks" report, and filter for outbound links returning 404. This shows you not just the site's broken links but the specific pages that contain them. You can filter by referring domain DR to prioritize higher-quality opportunities.

Ahrefs, Broken backlinks. Similar to the above but focused on broken links pointing to a specific domain. If you enter a competitor's domain that has reorganized its site or removed content, you will see all external links now pointing to dead pages. Those are your opportunities.

Semrush, Backlink Audit, "Target Pages" section. Filter by "Target URL error" to find URLs on your own domain that return errors. This is useful for recovering links you already had and lost, not for new outreach, but it complements the strategy.

One practical tip: resource pages and "best 50 tools for..." articles are the gold mines of broken link building. Those pages link to dozens of external sites, and over time several of those links break. The older and more extensive the page, the more broken links it will have.

Creating a replacement worth linking to

This is where many people fail. They find a broken link, take a quick look at what the original page contained (or don't even do that), and send an email suggesting their generic article as a substitute.

For the technique to work, your replacement has to be good. It does not have to cover exactly the same topic as the broken page, but it does have to be relevant to the context of the article containing the link.

Before writing the email, do this:

1. Use the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to see what was on the broken page. Enter the URL and look for a recent capture. This tells you what the original content covered and why the author decided to link to it.
2. Check if you already have something that covers that topic. If you do, great. If not, evaluate whether it is worth writing. An article covering the broken link's topic is an asset you can use in multiple outreachs, not just one.
3. If you create new content, make it better than the original. More data, more current, better structured. It is not enough to replicate what was there: you have to improve it.

The generic replacement ("I have an article about SEO that might work") convinces nobody. The specific replacement ("I noticed the link to [original article] is broken, and I have an updated guide on [specific topic] that covers the same point") does.

The email that works

The broken link building email should be short and useful. Two ideas: the heads-up and the offer.

Subject: Broken link on your article

Hi [name],

I noticed that your article "[title]" has a broken link pointing to [broken URL]. It returns a 404 error.

If you are looking for a replacement, I have a guide on [topic] that might work: [your URL]. Either way, thought you would want to know.

Best,
[your name]

Details that make a difference:

• Mention the specific page and the broken URL. Show that you actually visited the page, not that you sent the email blindly.
• Do not pressure. "Either way, thought you would want to know" makes clear that the heads-up is genuine, not a pretext for asking for a link.
• Include your replacement directly. Do not ask them to respond so you can send it. Make everything as easy as possible.
• Do not explain what broken link building is, do not mention SEO, do not talk about domain authority. Be a person helping another person.

The most powerful variant: inheriting competitor links

Standard broken link building looks for broken links on any relevant site. The advanced variant looks for broken links that used to point to your competitors.

When does this happen? When a competitor reorganizes their site, migrates content to new URLs, or deletes entire pages. All the external links that pointed to those pages become broken links overnight.

To find them:

1. Enter a competitor's domain into Semrush and go to the "Indexed Pages" report.
2. Enable the "Broken Pages" filter. You will see a list of the competitor's pages that no longer work, sorted by the number of domains linking to them.
3. Pages with the most linking domains are the most valuable opportunities. Each of those domains has a broken link that you can offer to replace.

The process after that is the same: create content covering the broken page's topic (better than the original if you can), contact the sites linking to it, and offer your replacement.

The advantage of this variant is that sites linking to your competitor have already shown they care about your industry. You do not have to convince them your topic is relevant. They already know.

Real results: what to expect

Broken link building is not fast. It requires research, quality content creation, and personalized emails. But the results are consistent when done well.

In our case and in agencies using MyBacklinkIndex, the numbers we have seen are roughly these: from 30 well-researched and personalized emails, between 4 and 8 deliver results. That is 4 to 8 quality backlinks over a period of two or three months, without spending money, and with links coming from sites that genuinely chose you as a replacement.

It is not the volume of a mass guest posting campaign. But the link quality is, on average, higher. They are contextual links, on relevant pages, that the webmaster added voluntarily because your content improved their article.

Verify that your new links are indexed

After getting several links through broken link building, the next step is checking that they are indexed.

In principle, webmasters who update their pages to add your link tend to have sites with good indexing. But not always. If the page linking to you is not indexed, the link is worthless, as we explained in our article on backlinks and AI.

Submit the URLs of the pages linking to you to MyBacklinkIndex to verify their indexing status. If any are not indexed, our system will reinforce the signal for a month so that crawlers visit them.

We give you 2000 free credits to verify your new backlinks. No credit card needed.

Summary

Broken link building is a link building technique where you help first and receive second. Find broken links on relevant sites, notify the owner, and offer your content as a replacement.

Key tools: Check My Links for manual exploration, Ahrefs for analysis at scale, Wayback Machine to understand what was on the broken page.

The most powerful variant is inheriting broken links from competitors who have reorganized or removed content. The sites that linked to them are already your target audience.

And as with any link building technique: verify that the links you got are indexed. A replaced broken link that nobody indexes is wasted work.