How Do You Leverage Broken Links For SEO?

As an online marketer, there are numerous strategies that you might want to implement to drive more traffic to your website. But one key aspect that has become popular over time is user experience. Search engines rank pages higher that load faster, that offer better navigation abilities, and which deliver a better experience to the users. In recent research that looked into why web performance matters, more than 88 percent of website visitors will not return if the website didn’t offer an amazing user experience, and one of the factors that lead to reduced user experience is the existence of broken links.

It’s annoying for anyone to visit your page only to encounter the word “sorry page not found”. The reason why people visit your web page is to get high-quality and valuable information, not broken links. Provided that webmasters continue moving their websites to new locations, or forget to get their hosting renewed, there will always be broken links all over the web.

Leveraging broken links

Although broken links can lead to a horrible experience for the year, it allows you to leverage on them and add value, and here are four ways that you can go about this.

1.) Secondary broken-link building

If you have done a link-building method for outreach, you will realize that it’s become hard to find high-quality links. However, one risk free method that you can try, and which the recipient doesn’t feel is being used is the provision of a reciprocal link to an authoritative website that is linking to your website.

For example: if you locate a dead resource in an area of interest, you can pitch that for guest posting on popular and established blogs such as HuffPost, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. After you get published on the authority site, you can ask the webmasters who are linking on the deal link to link on yours. Webmasters will not find it hard to link to your site.

2). Plug broken links into a backlink analytics tool to uncover more link sources

This involves extracting lots of juice after you have found a broken link on an authoritative site that falls within your niche. But the question is- how do you find broken links on sites of high authority other than Wikipedia?

Fortunately, there are awesome tools such as Screaming Frog that you can use to find broken incoming links of your competition. With this tool, you just need to plug in the niche-based high authority URLs that you have chosen then hit the start button. After you have got the results, you can sort them by using their status code. After you have got a 404 link, then you can go ahead to plug the URL into Ahrefs, then explore all the sites that link to it. Whether you are working alone, or with a SEO Agency, these tools can be of immense help.

3). Convert broken links into an opportunity

To survive in a competitive environment, you should build a relationship with other marketers. If you discover broken links in a blog and tell the owners, that will have helped you build a relationship, and on a great note. You might ask them if you can get an opportunity to write a guest post for their site. For better results on this, go for marketers who are at the same level as you, not influencers.

Conclusion

No matter the niche, there are hundreds of websites that have broken links. If you know what to do, rotten links can provide you with a terrific opportunity for link building. The three strategies that I have shown you above should help you convert dead links into an opportunity.

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