Broken Link Building 2014

I touched on this subject briefly in the epic link building post that I did a few months ago.

Tools Check List:
Google Chrome Browser
Domain Hunter Plus for Chrome
BuzzMarker

 

Look for some link building opportunities is easiest when you look for “links” or “resources” or even “must reads” or “best websites” pages. You’re basically looking for a page of external links on a related website. Obviously it’s better to have links within content than in lists on their own, but this might be a good starting point to get going.

For my own MMA and marketing website, I might search for something like

“MMA resources links”

One of the results that this search brought up was – http://www.fighting-mma.com/directory/mma-resources.php

Next, click the DomainHunter button on the Chrome Browser’s toolbar:

Download the results, (or just copy them) and then email them to the webmaster, offering some great content that you have made.
You can use BuzzMarker to find the contact details more quickly.

You can even use the WayBackWhen machine to find what content the site was pointing to. You could create some similar content before emailing the webmaster.
To use the WayBackWhen machine, go to archive.org, locate the ‘machine’ in the middle of the page, then enter your URL and press enter.
On the results page, on the calendar display, click on one of the dates highlighted with a blue circle:

You can then take this one step further:
Take the broken URL
Put the broken URL into a backlink checker like Majestic SEO and/or OpenSiteExplorer
See what links are pointing to the broken URL
Contact everyone who is linking to it, and offer your new, more up-to-date content (with a link that works)

Great tip from QuickSprout, use a date filter on searches. Using the Google Search Tools:

Choose a date from 2 or 3 years ago. Generally, the longer in time you go back, the more broken links you will find on pages. You’ll have to choose ‘customer range’ in the Search Tools

 

Broken Link Building in Bulk
Tools
Xenu  Try not to let the freaky illustrations scare you off.
For Mac you can use Screaming Frog
SEO Quake (for both PC and Mac, use in Chrome or FireFox)

Xenu is a site-wide broken link checker. You could use some search queries to find sites to check, or just go somewhere like Dmoz.

Do a full site ‘audit’ using Xenu or screaming frog and look for any 404 errors.
With Screaming Frog, after the crawl has finished – go to Advanced Export on the menu bar and export “All Out Links”
See the official website tutorial for more details.

 

I’ve not used it myself but 80legs, is apparently the way to go if you want to do a huge amount of link building