Broken link building is a way of earning links by finding links on other websites that point to pages that no longer work, then offering the site owner a relevant page of your own to replace them. The site owner fixes a fault on their site; you gain a link.
How broken link building works
Web pages disappear constantly. Businesses close, organisations restructure their sites, reports are taken down. Every page that links to one of those lost pages now sends visitors to a 404 error. The process has four steps:
- Find dead pages in your subject that used to attract links. SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush can list broken pages on a competitor’s or an industry site along with the number of sites still linking to them. Checking useful resource pages in your sector for dead links works too.
- Look at what the dead page used to contain, often through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so you know what the linking sites wanted to point their readers to.
- Make sure you have a page that genuinely does the same job, or better. If you do not, decide whether it is worth creating one.
- Contact the people whose pages carry the broken link, point out the dead link, and suggest your page as a replacement. This is a form of link building outreach.
Why it matters
It is one of the few link building methods that starts by helping the other person. You are reporting a real fault on their site, and broken links frustrate their readers. That makes the request easier to agree to than a cold ask.
It suits UK businesses in sectors where useful information gets published by organisations that later vanish or reorganise: closed trade bodies, merged charities, retired government guidance, local projects that ran out of funding. A garden designer, a heritage builder or an accountancy practice may find that a guide everyone once cited is now dead, and that writing a better, current version earns some of those links back.
Common mistakes
- Offering a page that does not match what the dead page was about. If the old link pointed to a planning permission guide, your homepage is not a replacement.
- Sending the same template email to hundreds of sites. Response rates fall and you look like a spammer.
- Targeting sites that are themselves abandoned. If the broken link has sat there for years, nobody may be maintaining the page.
- Expecting quick volume. A good campaign wins a modest number of relevant links, not dozens a week.
- Ignoring your own broken links, the easier job of link reclamation, where other sites link to pages on your site that you have moved or deleted.
How to act on it
Start at home. In Google Search Console’s Links report, or an SEO tool, find links pointing to URLs on your site that now return errors, and redirect each to the closest live page. That reclaims value with no outreach at all.
Then pick one topic where you can produce the best current resource, look for dead pages on that topic that still have links, and write to a short list of relevant sites with a personal, specific message: which page, where the broken link sits, and why your page would help their readers. Treat it as one-to-one correspondence, keep a record, and stop after one polite follow-up. Outreach to individuals still involves personal data, so UK GDPR applies to how you find and store contact details. I run this as one strand of a wider link building service, where it sits alongside digital PR and local links.