Broken Link Building: Is it the Best Link Building Practice Ever?

As SEOs we are always on the look-out for a legitimate link building practice, one that really, really works and that doesn’t trigger Google’s unnatural links warning or a Penguin attack – yes, there’s a difference between both of these: while the former is manual the latter is algorithmic. Broken link building is one such practice. Yes, you may have heard of it or used it before. But have you ever thought whether it’s the best link building practice ever? Better than infographics? Better than guest posts, too?

Let’s first revisit the whole broken link building thing.

Broken link building is based on the idea of finding broken links on the Web, contacting webmasters who own them and offering them some alternatives that they can’t deny. This practice, much to the good of every Web user, has a noble cause behind it– eradicating linkrot problems from the Web.

This is what the usability guru Jakob Nielsen lamented long ago about linkrot:

“Anything that reduces the prevalence and usefulness of cross-site linking is a direct attack on the founding principle of the Web.”

Broken Link Building Process

The process is simple: find the broken links first. There are numerous tools around the Web that can help you in this – Google Chrome extension, Firefox addon, Xenu Link Sleuth, Screaming Frog, Broken Link Finder, Broken Link Index, BuzzStream etc. It doesn’t make much sense to find broken links on the irrelevant sites. Aside from relevance you must see PageRank, MozRank and whether the site’s been crawled by search engines.

The second and final step involves reaching out to the prospective webmasters – how you reach out matters a lot. Go to the contact page for an email id or a contact form. In case the contact information is not available, take the help of WHOIS. Your email should have a helpful, conversational tone so the webmaster feels that you genuinely want to help them clean up their site a bit. Don’t go on outreaching like this:

“Hey, I’m an SEO who’s on a mission to create link bank for my clients. I really like the PR and MozRank of your site and the fact that search engines love it. It’d be great if you list some of my clients so they can benefit from your high-authority backlink. Your site is really, really relevant for them – and you know relevance has become a new pain area for SEOs. So please don’t deny.

Don’t feel missed out. I have a ridiculous something for you, too. While you help me gain backlinks for my clients – and they give me fat cheques – I help you clean up your website. Yes, I can help you remove some rotten links from your site (not all, mind). In fact, my proposal is not as one-sided as it sounds: I won’t mind if you replace my links with those rotten links. Thanks.”

Ok, I did go a little far there, but only to highlight the importance of good outreach emails for broken link building.

So is it the best link building practice ever?

I’d love to call it a good practice but broken link building can never be the best ever. Why, you ask? It’s not because broken link building is not so effective, but no solution is the be all and end all. I mean to say that just as all other link building practices even broken link building can’t be the ultimate solution. It’s diversity that matters most in SEO, giving us the best results ever and helping us make happy clients.