Broken link building is finding dead pages that other sites still link to, then asking those sites to point the link at a working page of yours instead.
The appeal is obvious: you are offering to fix something rather than asking for a favour. The part that rarely gets said is that the discovery step depends on a paid backlink index, and the free alternatives are much narrower. This covers how it works, what it genuinely costs, and how to tell whether it is worth your time.
Why it works better than a cold ask
An ordinary outreach email asks someone to do you a favour. A broken link email tells them something on their site is broken, which is information they want, and then offers the fix.
That changes the conversation. You are not interrupting to promote yourself, you are reporting a defect. Editors and site owners genuinely do not want dead links on their pages, because they look careless and they send readers nowhere.
It also targets pages that already link out, which means you are approaching people who have demonstrably linked to resources like yours before. Most outreach fails because the recipient never links to anyone.
If you are new to outreach generally, the groundwork is in our guide to starting a link building campaign. This piece assumes you already know the basics and goes into the execution.
The tool problem nobody leads with
Here is the honest constraint. To do this at scale you need to find pages that are dead and have links pointing at them. Seeing which dead URLs have backlinks requires a backlink index, and the ones large enough to be useful are paid.
Free tools exist but answer a different question. Ahrefs publishes a free Broken Link Checker that will “check your site for broken inbound and outbound links” and highlights “the most linked-to dead pages on your site”. Source: Ahrefs. That is genuinely useful, and it is about your own site, not about finding dead pages elsewhere to build links from.
So be clear about which version you are doing. With a paid index you can work through hundreds of opportunities. Without one, you have three free routes, and they are slower.
Three routes that work without a paid index
Wikipedia dead links. Wikipedia marks unreachable citations with a dead link tag, and those pages are publicly searchable. Find ones in your subject, see whether you have a genuine replacement, and the fix helps readers whether or not you get a link. Treat the Wikipedia link itself as a bonus rather than the goal, since editors will remove anything self-promotional.
Resource pages in your niche. Find pages that list tools or guides on your subject, then check their outbound links for dead ones using a free broken link checker extension. These pages exist to link out, so the ask is small. This is slow but it needs no subscription.
Dead pages on sites you already know. Competitors and former competitors shut down sections, retire tools and delete guides. If you know a resource that used to exist and no longer does, anyone who linked to it now has a dead link, and you can find those linking pages with a plain search for the old URL or its title.
The step everyone skips: having a real replacement
The whole pitch rests on having something genuinely equivalent to what died. This is where most attempts fall apart.
If the dead page was a detailed statistics roundup and you offer a short blog post, you are asking someone to replace a good resource with a worse one. They will not, and you have burned the contact.
So qualify ruthlessly before writing a single email. Look at what the dead page actually was, using an archive of it if you can find one. Then ask whether your page covers the same ground at the same depth. If it does not, you have two options: write something that does, or skip the opportunity.
That is the real cost of this tactic. It is not the outreach, it is the content you may need to build first, which is why it suits people who already have a deep library rather than people starting out.
The outreach itself
Keep it short, specific and verifiable.
- Name the exact page and the exact link. Not “a link on your site”. Give the URL of their page and the dead URL it points to, so they can check in ten seconds.
- Say what it was. They may not remember what they linked to. One line describing the dead resource saves them the work.
- Offer the replacement once, without pressure. One sentence and one link. Making it conditional or pushy turns a helpful note into a pitch.
- Do not claim it is broken without checking. Confirm the dead URL really returns a 404 rather than being temporarily down, or you will be the person who emailed about nothing.
- Expect silence. Most people do not reply, and that is not personal. Our blogger outreach templates cover the wording.
Send one follow-up at most, a week later, and then stop.
Measure your own rate, do not trust a benchmark
Published success rates for this tactic vary enormously and none of them describe your site, your subject or your replacement content. Rather than trusting a number, measure your own after the first batch.
Track four things: opportunities found, opportunities that survived qualification, emails sent, and links earned. The ratio between the second and first tells you whether your library is deep enough. The ratio between the fourth and third tells you whether your email works.
Then put a time cost against it. If thirty hours produced two links, you now know what a link costs you through this channel, and you can compare it honestly against writing something people link to on their own, which is the slower route covered in building blog authority.
When it is not worth doing
- You have little content to offer as a replacement. The tactic converts an existing library into links. It does not work in reverse.
- Your subject has few resource pages. Some niches link out constantly, others barely at all.
- You have no paid index and no patience. The free routes work and they are slow, and knowing that in advance prevents abandoning the effort halfway.
- Your site is brand new. People check who they are linking to. A site with nothing on it is a hard ask regardless of how broken their link is.
Worth remembering what you are building here. Links matter because they are a signal another site chose to vouch for you, and the distinction between links and referring domains applies just as much to this channel as any other, as our guide to what a backlink is explains. Twenty links from one resource site is one opinion.
Frequently asked questions
What is broken link building?
Broken link building is finding dead pages that other websites still link to, then contacting those sites and suggesting they point the link at an equivalent working page of yours. It works better than cold outreach because you are reporting a genuine defect rather than asking for a favour, and because you are approaching pages that already link out to resources.
Does broken link building still work?
Yes, as a tactic the logic is unchanged, because site owners still do not want dead links on their pages. What has changed is the competition for the easy opportunities and the cost of finding them at scale. The limiting factor is usually whether you have a genuinely equivalent replacement page, not whether the approach works.
Can you do broken link building for free?
Partly. Finding dead pages that have backlinks at scale needs a paid backlink index, and the free checkers available are designed to audit your own site rather than find opportunities elsewhere. The free routes that do work are Wikipedia dead links, checking outbound links on niche resource pages, and tracking down who linked to resources you know have shut down.
What should the replacement page be?
Something genuinely equivalent to what died, at a similar depth. If the dead page was a detailed resource and you offer a short post, you are asking someone to downgrade their page, and they will decline. Look at an archived copy of the dead page before you email, and skip the opportunity if you cannot match it.
What success rate should I expect?
Published benchmarks vary enormously and none of them describe your site or your subject, so measure your own instead. Track opportunities found, how many survived qualification, emails sent and links earned, then put a time cost against the result. That gives you a real cost per link for this channel that you can compare against other ways of earning links.
Is broken link building against Google’s guidelines?
No. You are suggesting a replacement for a link that already existed, and the site owner decides whether to make the change, which is editorial rather than manipulative. It becomes a problem only if you start paying for placements or sending links at scale to pages that have no relevance to the dead resource.