Broken link building is when you find a broken link on someone’s page, tell them about it and then suggest your link as a replacement.
DEEP broken link building is when you go one level deeper and find EVERY site linking to the same broken link and reach out to them too.
So let’s go deeper…
Deep Broken Link Building VIDEO Tutorial
In the video below I’m going to take you on a journey through the entire deep broken link building process, from extraction to outreach using the best tools for broken link building: Ahrefs, Screaming Frog SEO Spider and BuzzStream.
You’re about to go two levels deep, where you’ll find HUNDREDS of broken links in MINUTES and open Pandora’s Box to LIMITLESS link building opportunities.
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Tools used in order of appearance:
- Simple Google Results bookmarklet – get Google’s results in plain list format
- Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool – remove duplicate URLs from same host
- Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool – fast overview of link batches
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider – find all the broken links on a list of pages
- Remove Duplicate Items tool – remove duplicate URLs
- Extract Unique Hostnames tool – strip a list of URLs to their root domain
- BuzzStream – manage and organise outreach effectively
Here’s the FULL TRANSCRIPT and an explanation for each step of the process:
What is deep broken link building?
Broken link building is when you find a broken link on someone’s page, tell them about it and then suggest your link as a replacement.
DEEP broken link building is when you go one step further and find every site linking to the same broken link and reach out to them too!
You’re about to learn:
- How to find hundreds of broken links in minutes using the SEO Spider tool
- Get a list of all the sites linking to them using Ahrefs
- Decide which of those sites you WANT links from
- And reach out to them instantly with BuzzStream!
Case Study: LaminateFloorBlog.com
For the purpose of this broken link building tutorial I’ve created a little niche site called LaminateFloorBlog.com:
You see, I used to be in the laminate flooring industry back when I was working in China, so I know A LOT about the industry!
The particular page I want to build links to is all about cleaning laminate floors the right way. (Incase you were wondering, the right way is with microfiber mops ;))
Let’s get started!
Links pages are the best place to hunt for broken links
Use a Google search like, keyword inurl:links, to find hundreds of links pages in SECONDS:
Set search setting to 100 results per page and use the Simple Google Results bookmarklet to get results in plain list format (you’ll want to add the bookmarklet to your browser):
As you can see, the Simple Google Results bookmarklet lists Google’s results in plain listing so you can grab them in SECONDS:
Some of the URLs might be duplicate URLs from the same site. To remove duplicates, use 51 Blocks’ Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool:
And copy the results:
Now we’re going to use Ahrefs to help sort through the list of URLs and quickly remove any sites not worth crawling for broken links.
Go to Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool:
Paste in the de-duped list and hit Start Analysis:
Then export the results to Excel and remove all columns except Target and Domain Rank:
Repeat for 2nd and 3rd page of Google’s results, or as long as results are still relevant, e.g. page #3 of Google is still showing flooring links pages:
Copy Target and Domain Rank from each set of 100 results and paste them into the first Excel.
Select all and sort by Domain Rank.
Sorting by Domain Rank puts unique domains and sites like Pinterest at the top of the list as you’ll want to delete these because they’ll take too long to crawl for broken links:
The finished product is lots of relevant links pages 🙂
Copy all the Target URLs from the Excel and use 51 Blocks’ Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool to de-dupe the list again to make sure we don’t waste time crawling duplicate URLs!
Paste the de-duped list into a text editor and Save As a .txt file:
Crawling for Broken Links with the SEO Spider
It’s time to use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to find all the broken links on those pages!
In Screaming Frog SEO Spider choose List as the Mode:
Then, go to Configuration > Spider and check these boxes:
Once you’ve checked those, limit the search depth to 1:
Choose the .txt file you want to crawl (in the video example it was flooringlinks.txt) and click Start:
Grab a beer whilst it crawls 🙂
When it gets to 100%, export all the 4xx links by going to Advanced Export > Client Error (4xx) In Links:
The SEO Spider found hundreds of broken links:
At this point you can either just reach out to the people who own those links pages and fix their broken links:
Or…go DEEPER and find ALL the sites that are linking to these broken links and reach out to them too:
So let’s go deeper and find ALL the sites linking to those broken pages.
Because there are a lot of duplicate URLs you’ll need to use Ontolo’s Remove Duplicate Items tool. (This is different to the Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool, because it doesn’t remove different URLs from the same site):
Copy the de-duped list, open a new Excel and paste:
Delete URLs that don’t fit, e.g. unrelated to your niche, directories, etc. (Because there’s no point in pitching your link if it’s totally unrelated to the broken link).
Once you’re done select all, copy, paste into Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool and hit Start Analysis.
You can now quickly see which of the broken links have the most referring domains linking to them and make fast decisions about which opportunities you want to pursue:
Sort by Referring Domains and look for a good match with lots of referring domains:
I started with this one on Armstrong.com because it had lots of referring domains:
and Armstrong is a HUGE supplier of laminate flooring:
Although the particular broken URL is a page about cabinets (not laminate flooring), I still thought of a random way I could pitch my link 😉
After you visit the broken URL and decide they’re a good match go ahead and download backlinks to that URL!
To do this, open the backlinks report in a new tab and export all the backlinks to Excel:
In the Excel, ONLY Copy URLs with Ahref Rank 5 and above:
Why only copy sites with Ahrefs Rank above 5?
Because Ahrefs Rank tells you:
- Exactly how much link juice a site will pass on to you
- And sites with high Ahrefs Rank
- Have more quality sites linking to them
- Which means you ONLY want links from these sites
- And can quickly decide which sites you DON’T want links from
Use 51 Blocks’ Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool again, copy the results and paste into a brand new Excel.
This new (and final Excel sheet) is to prepare the prospects for email outreach with BuzzStream!
In the new Excel, name column #1 “Linking From” and paste in that de-duped list:
Name column #2 “Domain”:
Now, copy all URLs with no “www.” and use Ontolo’s Extract Unique Hostnames tool to strip the URLs to their root domain, then paste the root domains into the Domain column:
Then repeat the process for the “www.” URLs. (The reason why you need to do this chunk of URLs separately is because Ontolo’s tool often mismatches the list if you do them all together and then it’s a nightmare to line them up in the Excel).
Name column #3 “Linking To” and insert the broken link everyone’s linking to:
I also name column #4 “Link Link Tag”, which is a Custom Links Field I use to tag my link prospects in BuzzStream – this makes it easy for me to find this group of prospects later once I upload them into my little black book of contacts:
You are now ready for outreach with BuzzStream!
Save the Excel as a .csv file, login to BuzzStream and create a new project for the page you’re building links to:
Name your project:
And enter the URL of the page you’re building links to:
Upload your list of prospects to the project via the Link Monitoring tab:
When you upload the file, make sure the data fields match up correctly and hit the Import these contacts button:
Whilst BuzzStream is scraping contact details from those sites, you can create an email template for outreach under the Websites tab:
Use the [ul:Linking From] field and the [ul:Linking To] field so you can reference the page their broken link is on and what they’re linking to:
Once you’ve created a template you can go and find those contacts you just uploaded. Use the filter:
Remember we added a Link Tag?
You can filter your black book of contacts to find your list of prospects (in this case tagged “Armstrong”) easily:
Now the list of Websites has been filtered to just list sites liking to Armstrong:
Sort by Discovered Contact Info and select contacts BuzzStream found email addresses for so you can start outreach IMMEDIATELY:
Click Start Outreach and choose the email template you just created:
As you can see [ul:Linking From] is now the correct URL:
You can schedule for later or send now:
After you’ve finished outreach for your first group of prospects you can go back to Ahrefs and continue working through the list!
Opening Pandora’s Box
Then once you’re done you can rinse and repeat the entire process with HUNDREDS more different search strings and open up Pandora’s Box to LIMITLESS broken link building opportunities!
And that’s my process for deep broken link building!
I wanted to share this with you because it is literally one of the main methods I used to take my new niche site’s traffic from 220 visits a day to over 500 a day in less than a month:
Here’s a recap of the tools I used in the tutorial:
- Simple Google Results bookmarklet – get Google’s results in plain list format
- Remove Duplicate Hostnames tool – remove duplicate URLs from same host
- Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool – fast overview of link batches
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider – find all the broken links on a list of pages
- Remove Duplicate Items tool – remove duplicate URLs
- Extract Unique Hostnames tool – strip a list of URLs to their root domain
- BuzzStream – manage and organise outreach effectively
And if you’re looking for more AMAZING resources on broken link building be sure to check these posts out:
Broken Link Building Treasure Troves
- The Broken Link Building Bible by Russ Jones
- Black Belt Broken Link Building by Neil Patel and Brian Dean
- How to Use the SEO Spider for Broken Link Building by Dan Sharp
- How to Find Thousands of Broken Link Opportunities at a Time by Ken McGaffin
Before I wrap this up I’d like to say a BIG thank you to Matthew Woodward for teaching me how to make YouTube videos here.
Wrapping it up
Going two levels deep is the key to opening Pandora’s Box of LIMITLESS broken link building opportunities. In the next video I might even go THREE levels deep and see if inception is possible 😉
It took me a LOT of time to learn how to make videos and put this whole thing together, so please kindly help share if you liked it:
Also do subscribe to my NEW YouTube Channel: Clambr Up to get more over the shoulder videos just like this one!
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and if you have any questions about deep broken link building, or a suggestion for my next video please leave them in the comments below. Thank you!
Hey Richard, Thanks a lot for the post.
For a moment I thought you went AWOL as you were not so active on the blog in the first few months of 2014 but boy Im glad you are back.
Keep up the good work.
Brian Dean also has a good post about broken links strategy but yours ads some great twists.
Andrei
Hey Andrei, it’s great to see you again mate and wow, what an awesome comment! Thank you!
I did indeed go a little AWOL for a while hehe. Have been working on the new niche site and spent a good few weeks locked in a dark room link building 😉
Catch you soon and hope you’ll enjoy the next video!
OK, three things:
1) GREAT article! Most detailed I’ve seen regarding broken link building.
2) How do you find the contact emails? I checked two sites with broken links (one is even an EDU domain) but I can’t find any email information!
3) Do you mind if I use the email that you send to webmasters? I’ll reword it a bit, of course!
Thanks again!
Hey Michelle thanks for your support!
BuzzStream usually scrapes most of the contact emails after I upload them but for the emails it can’t find I’ll either visit those sites myself or outsource it. I know that sometimes it can be hard to find contact information on a site though so if I can’t find an email address I usually take a guess at what they are. If you find out who runs the site on the About page or who regularly posts on the blog you can usually guess their email address. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Occasionally you can also find their email address by typing @websitename.com into Google and it will find a page with the emails on.
And of course I don’t mind if you use a similar version to my outreach email. I’m always changing them up and trying different versions 🙂
Thanks!
Richard, you’ve done it again. I’m not easily impressed when it comes to link building strategies, but you always give me a 1001 ideas I can use for my site. Great post 🙂
Thanks Brian! Your tips on Backlinko have been an absolute inspiration to me. Learned so much from you in such a short period of time and am having soooo much fun implementing them.
Btw, the expired domain link building strategy in your last post on Ecommerce SEO has worked absolute wonders on the new niche site. Got some really nice links from it and still thousands more prospects to reach out to! We’re getting 750 visits a day now and pretty sure we’ll hit the 1000 a day mark after a little more outreach. Will be sure to let you know when that happens 🙂
Thanks again man and looking forward to your next post!
Great post and broken link building is a great way to get good content. So my question is this: if you stumble on a broken link, do you copy the content or rewrite it? Which do you support?
Thanks Adegboye and that’s a good question!
If I have time to rewrite the content I’ll do it and make something better than the original resource, but because I often don’t have time to put a whole new post together I’ll usually help the blogger out by suggesting a quality replacement to the broken link and then pitch my link as a nice addition to the page.
The way I pitch my link as an addition is to find a phrase on the page that fits the subject of my link and then ask the blogger if they’d kindly add my link to that phrase whilst they’re updating the page 😉
So for example, if there’s some text on the page that says “broken link building” I’d suggest them to add my link to that anchor text. A little cheeky, yes, but I’ve had some amazing results from this!
Hi i was amazed the competitive BLink building you did here. But there’ some confusion left in my head. Care to enlighten me? Here it is.
– Exactly how much link juice a site will pass on to you
– Have more quality sites linking to them
What i understands here is that the more quality links linking to them is the more link juices we gained?? But how come we limit the AHREFs rank to 5 in the first place?.
Thanks and was a good read! Love the style
Hey Carl, awesome question and I’m glad you asked because you’ve made me realise I should include a deeper explanation about this in the transcript.
Basically, you don’t want links from low quality sites because they could actually do more harm than good, so it’s important to eliminate low quality sites from the list before you start email outreach.
The reason I delete anything below Ahref Rank 5 is because I usually find anything below Ahrefs Rank 5 usually has an Ahrefs Domain Rank either on or below 30. This means the root domain has more link juice than only 30% of the all the sites on the web. Therefore, I don’t think sites below the 30% bracket are going to be of much help. Also there’s a high chance a lot of those sites have dodgy backlink profiles and I’d rather stay clear of them than risk getting a link from them.
Here are two pages that explain Ahrefs Rank and Domain Rank quite well:
https://ahrefs.com/faqs.php
https://ahrefscom.zendesk.com/entries/23310186-Principles-of-Ahrefs-Domain-Rank-calculation
Hope that helps! I find it pretty hard to get my head around to be honest 😉
Hi Richard
I love your link building round up and broken link building insights. I think you must be the king of these topics. 🙂
Quick q: did you notice an increase in your affiliate sales since starting these round-up posts (e.g. BuzzStream)?
I look forward to your next goodies!
Best!
Thanks Codrut! The plan has always been to promote the best tools in the industry by finding out what the experts use and then make useful tutorials on how to use them.
I only promote the tools I use and trust and BuzzStream is the tool behind the success of this blog and my other niche sites, so I’m happy to recommend it.
Thanks, that really only makes sense if one uses the whole suit of tools as you describe above. Thanks for the actionable information and also for presenting tidbits from case studies which make it more plausible to give it a try!
Cheers Darragh. It does indeed only make sense if you use the same set of tools but I just wanted to share my process with you.
I did think about trying to simplify it to make it a universal process that can be used for any set of tools, but if i did that then it would be an entirely different video, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to demonstrate the process from start to finish.
Hi, Richard, you did a good job, that’s great. now you are so professional in that, and i will focus on you blog and study more seo skills from you! hehe, take a good care of yourself! nice day!
Hehe thanks Steven and hope to see you again soon 🙂
wonderful and very useful tutorial , but unfortunately the tools you have mentioned give only limited access for free. Any way great work Richard
Hey Abhishek, yeah sorry I couldn’t make the tutorial with a free set of tools. Maybe I’ll do that in the next one.
Great tool shared by you but some have only limited access but really helpful to understand broken link building..
No worries Amit and thanks for your feedback.
Dude! This is money. Just got a PR 7 from the first batch I sent out. Pretty cool… I tried doing it using majestic and moz first (because I had subscriptions) but it was taking forever. Signed up for ahrefs and it was a breeze.
Thanks again!
Awesome stuff Jason!! If I could upvote your comment I would! PR7 is pretty damn sweet and I’m sure you’ll get a sh*t load more!
Keep on trucking dude and so happy it’s working wonders for you!
Hi,
Deep linking is helps you more in SEO. As an search engine optimizer the biggest thing is how to utilize resource to gain back-links. Through deep liniking you just not increase the home page link but also increase the roots one too. 🙂
Regards!!!
Hiten
It sure does! Thanks for stopping by Hiten.
Hey Richard,
What is the best way to monitor for links? I tried using the buzzstream link checker but because we are already using the link from and link to forms with the old website it wont work.
Any tips on this? I would rather not have to search every website manually for a link back.
Thanks!
Hi Richard, thank you for your great post.
I’ve found a broken link in THIS POST!!!
just a typo: a link to http:www.buzzstreamfreetrial.com for your first link to BuzzStream
Can I get a link to my site as a “thank you”? 😉
Great tutorial!
Great Tips Dude. i like the whole article.
Any recommendations on how to use this with xenu sleuth? screaming frogs is kind of pricey
Hi Richard,
I really thank you for describing the process of deep broken link building.
For me,it was difficult before reading your great article to understand this process,but now it becomes easier for me.
good you guys go in very deep of links i like it and i try it…
Hi Richard
I’ve just realised that I’ve watched this video 3 times and haven’t even said thank you. So thank you 🙂
This is a fantastic tutorial and I can fully see how you could use this technique to build all of your natural, niche specific links to any given site. I’ve dabbled already but am definitely going to step it up using this method.
I reckon social media sharing, content led outreach and broken link building on every post should just about cover it.
Cheers!
Loz
Hey Richard,
Thanks for these linkbuilding hacks. The Google Results bookmarklet is a great time-saver. Is there any free alternative to proceed to these Ahref batching analaysis steps?
Clemence
Ahrefs’ Batch Analysis tool – fast overview of link batches
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – find all the broken links on a list of pages
Remove Duplicate Items tool – remove duplicate URLs
Extract Unique Hostnames tool – strip a list of URLs to their root domain
BuzzStream – manage