Broken Link Building: Finding and Replacing Dead Links

Short answer

Broken link building means finding links on other sites that point to pages that no longer exist, and telling the site owner, with a page of yours that can replace the dead one if it really does the same job. It works when it's a real favor: the owner fixes a broken link for their readers, and your page is one option they can choose. It fails when the "replacement" is a stretch or the outreach is a disguised link request. Fixing links to your own moved or deleted pages is a different task, covered in link reclamation.

Sources

1developers.google.com

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Finding Dead Links Worth Replacing

Dead pages that used to earn links. In a backlink tool, look at pages in your field, including competitors’, that now return 404 or 410 but still have links pointing to them. Every site linking to such a page has a broken link.
Resource pages in your field, which link out to many sources and can collect dead links over time; see resource page link building.
Sites you’d like a link from. Crawl them with a site crawler set to report broken outbound links.
Searches such as “useful resources” or “recommended links” plus your topic, to find curated pages to check.

Confirm each dead link yourself before contacting anyone: open it, and check that it returns an error rather than a redirect to a working page. Status codes are explained in HTTP status codes.

Choosing Which to Pursue

Question	Pursue	Skip
Is the linking page relevant to your topic?	Same subject and audience	Unrelated subject
Is the link in the content?	In the body text, where readers use it	Buried in a footer or a long unmaintained list
Is the page maintained?	Recently updated, with a named author or editor	Abandoned, with no way to reach anyone
Can you replace what was there?	You have, or can make, something that does the same job	The original was unique research or a tool you can't match

Check what the dead page contained with an archived copy, such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The site owner linked to that content; your replacement has to serve the same purpose.

The Replacement Page

Same topic and depth. A full guide replaces a full guide; a short post doesn’t.
Current and accurate, since it’s being offered as the fix.
Better where you can be, with updated information or a clearer structure, without changing what the original was for.
Worth linking on its own merits. If you’d hesitate to recommend it without the broken link, it isn’t ready.

One well-made replacement can answer every site that linked to the same dead page.

Outreach

Find a person: the author or editor of the page, rather than a generic form.
Lead with the problem: which page, which link, and where on the page it is.
Offer your page as one option, and say plainly that it’s yours.
Keep it short and polite, with no pressure and no repeated chasing.
Never offer payment or a swap for the link. Exchanging money, goods or services for links for ranking purposes is link spam under Google’s spam policies; a link someone is paid to place has to be qualified with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow".

For example:

Subject: Broken link on your “Home Energy Audit Checklist” page
Hi Dana, on your Home Energy Audit Checklist, the link in the “Insulation” section to an insulation calculator now returns a “page not found” error. I wrote a current guide to estimating attic insulation needs, linked below, if it’s useful as a replacement; either way, I wanted you to know about the dead link.

The owner may remove the link, choose another source, or use yours; all three fix the problem you reported.

Running It as a Program

Group opportunities by the dead page they link to, so one replacement serves many contacts.
Personalize every message to the page and link in question; a template with the details filled in is still personal if the details are right.
Track each contact, date, reply and outcome, so nobody is contacted twice.
Measure your own rates from your first batches before planning volume. Response and placement rates depend on the field, the quality of the replacement and the outreach, so other people’s figures aren’t a planning basis.

Measuring Broken Link Campaigns

Links placed and the pages they come from, in Search Console’s Links report and your backlink tool.
Referral traffic from those links, in GA4.
Replies that removed or fixed the link without using yours, as a sign the outreach was useful even when it didn’t produce a link.

Link earning more broadly is covered in link building fundamentals, and finding where competitors’ links come from in competitor backlink analysis.

Broken Link Outreach Mistakes

Offering a page that doesn’t do what the dead page did.
Reporting links that aren’t actually broken.
Hiding that the suggested page is yours.
Paying or trading for the replacement link.
Repeated follow-ups to people who didn’t answer.
Judging the program by email volume instead of by links from relevant pages.

Offer your page only when it does the dead link’s job at least as well; when it doesn’t, report the broken link anyway and move on, since the report is useful to the site owner either way.