Broken Link Building Explained
Find a dead link, offer a working replacement. One of the few outreach pitches that starts by being useful to the other person.
Most link outreach asks for a favour. Broken link building offers one.
It's one of the "built" routes to a backlink covered in our link building guide — a close sibling to guest posting, but with a more concrete opening pitch.
How it works
- Find a relevant resource page or article. Look for pages in your niche that link out to external sources — roundups, resource lists, and older articles tend to accumulate the most dead links over time.
- Check the outbound links for ones that are broken. A broken-link checker (built into most SEO crawling tools) flags dead URLs across a page or a whole site far faster than checking by hand.
- Create or identify a genuinely relevant replacement. The closer your page matches what the dead link used to point to, the easier the ask.
- Reach out with the specific broken link, not a general pitch. Naming the exact dead URL and where it sits on the page shows you actually did the work, which gets a noticeably better response rate.
What makes a good replacement
Content that closely matches what the original link pointed to. If a dead link used to point to a guide on a specific topic, a matching guide of yours is an easy swap. A generic homepage link is rarely accepted — the site owner is fixing a specific gap, not doing you a general favour.
Why it's low-risk
You're not paying for anything and the site owner keeps full editorial control over whether to accept your suggestion. That keeps this tactic well inside earned, legitimate link building rather than anywhere near a manipulative scheme — see toxic links for what the other end of that spectrum looks like.
Where to go next
Guest posting is a related outreach tactic that builds a relationship rather than fixing a specific gap. Digital PR covers the earned end of the spectrum, where links come to you unprompted.
Frequently asked questions
What is broken link building?
Broken link building means finding a dead or broken outbound link on someone else's website, then reaching out to the site owner to point it out and suggest a working page of yours as the replacement. It works because you're offering to fix a real problem on their site, not just asking for a favour.
How do you find broken links on other websites?
The usual approach is to find resource pages or articles relevant to your topic, then check their outbound links for ones that no longer resolve. Backlink and SEO tools that crawl and flag broken links speed this up considerably compared to checking links by hand.
Does broken link building actually work?
It works, but not at a high volume — most outreach emails go unanswered, broken link building included. It's worth doing because the pitch is genuinely useful to the site owner (you're helping them fix something), which gets a noticeably better response than a cold ask for a link with nothing offered in return.
What kind of content works best for broken link building?
Content that closely matches what the original broken link pointed to. A generic homepage link rarely gets accepted as a replacement — a specific guide, tool, or page covering the same topic as the dead resource is what makes the swap an easy yes for the site owner.
Is broken link building safe from a Google guidelines perspective?
Yes. You're not paying for the link and the site owner retains full editorial control over whether to accept the suggestion, which keeps it well inside legitimate, earned link-building rather than a manipulative scheme.
Want a hand running outreach that actually gets replies?
Send us the domain. We'll tell you where the realistic link opportunities actually are.