Broken Link Building: Find Dead Resources and Earn the Replacement Link Without a Link Scheme

Broken link building is the practice of finding a link on someone else's page that now leads to an error, then suggesting your own page as a working replacement. It still works when your page really does fill the gap the dead one left, because the site owner gets a repaired page and you get a link that was earned on merit.

It stops working when it turns into a template blast. Site owners receive many requests, and a pitch that clearly did not read the page gets deleted. There is also no published success rate worth quoting; treat any vendor claim about reply or placement percentages as unverified.

Where it sits against Google policy is a matter of intent. Google defines link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate search rankings. Its documents do not name this particular tactic, so judge each step by that definition: are you helping a real page work better, or manufacturing a link?

Look for pages that curate links on your topic, and check which of those links have died. Resource lists, glossaries, "further reading" sections and long-form guides all collect links over the years, and many go stale without anyone noticing. A crawler or browser link-checker will flag the broken ones in seconds; the harder step is choosing which are worth your time.

Check what the dead page used to contain. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine often holds a copy, and without it you are guessing at what the linking page expected. If the lost resource was a calculator and you offer a sales page, the match fails.

Prioritise by relevance and by who maintains the page. A live, edited page whose author clearly updates it is a better prospect than an abandoned directory. Pages that exist only to hold links are the ones Google's link spam examples describe, so skip them.

You need a page that serves the same need as the dead one and does it at least as well. A product or service page rarely qualifies. A reference page, a worked example, a data summary, a template or a tool usually does, because the original linker chose a source for readers, not a sales pitch.

If nothing you own fits, build the resource first and pitch afterwards. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether a page offers original information, reporting or analysis beyond the obvious. That is the standard a replacement should meet, and it is also what a careful site owner will judge. The temptation to publish a thin page quickly just to have something to offer runs into the policy that names creating low-value content primarily to manipulate linking and ranking signals.

Plan on a small number of strong replacement pages that each cover many dead links, rather than one custom page per prospect.

Write to one named person, say exactly which link is broken and where it sits on their page, and offer your page as an optional fix. Keep it short, make clear who you are, and make saying no easy. The message is a favour offered, not a favour owed.

Do not ask for particular anchor text, and do not suggest that the replacement is the only option. Send at most one polite follow-up. Never offer money, free products or a reciprocal link in return: Google lists exchanging money or goods for links, and excessive link exchanges, among its link spam examples.

Check the email rules too. The US CAN-SPAM Act covers commercial messages, including email promoting content on commercial websites, and makes no exception for business-to-business email. It requires accurate sender details and a clear way to opt out. Rules differ by country, so confirm your process with counsel if you send at any scale.

A relevant suggestion that the site owner is free to accept or ignore is acceptable. Anything that pays for, trades for, automates or compels the link moves toward a scheme. Google also notes that buying and selling links is a normal part of advertising, as long as the links are qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow", so the question is not whether money exists but whether a ranking-passing link is being bought.

The same rule applies on the receiving end. If you maintain a site and get these requests, you decide what to link to, and you can mark sponsored or user-generated links with the rel values in Google's outbound link guidance.

Count the work honestly. Track pages checked, qualified prospects, messages sent, replies, links placed and the relevance of each linking page, then compare the hours spent with other ways to earn links, such as original research or digital PR. Illustrative case: forty carefully matched pitches might produce a handful of replies and one or two placed links. Treat that as a slow channel, not a quota.

This tactic is a poor fit for sites with little content to offer, and for businesses in regulated fields where every public page needs review before it is promoted. Start with the cheapest step first: find your own deleted URLs that still attract links and redirect them. That recovers value without sending a single email.

The same logic works on the receiving side of the link. Go through your own site for pages you deleted or renamed in the past, then use server logs and a backlink tool to see which of those addresses other sites still link to. A permanent redirect to the closest living page sends those visitors somewhere useful and lets the old link keep working, and it asks nothing of anyone. If that list is long, it is usually a better first project than outreach, because the links already exist and the only thing missing is a correct destination.

Handle the pages that were removed with no real equivalent differently. If no relevant destination exists, a 404 or 410 is the correct answer, and a redirect to an unrelated page is not.