Broken Link Building: A Practical Workflow
Broken-link building trades a helpful favor for a link. Here's a practical, repeatable workflow to find dead links and pitch your replacement.
Broken-link building is one of the most editor-friendly tactics in SEO: you find a dead link on a relevant page, and you offer a working replacement — often your own content. Done well, it helps the site owner and earns you a link.
Find the broken links
Target resource pages and roundups in your niche, then scan them for dead outbound links. Pages that curate lots of external links are the richest hunting grounds.
Match a genuinely equivalent replacement
Your replacement must actually replace the dead resource. If the broken link pointed to a statistics page and you offer a sales page, you'll be ignored. Relevance is everything.
- Confirm the link is truly broken (404 / gone).
- Offer content that matches the original's intent.
- Make the editor's job effortless — give the exact URL.
Pitch as a favor, not a favor request
Frame the email around helping them fix a broken page — your link is the convenient solution, not the ask. BacklinkGoals' broken-link template generator drafts this framing for you in seconds.
Turn this into a tracked backlink goal
BacklinkGoals helps you set a target, find ethical opportunities, and track every prospect, pitch, and win in one place.
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