Broken Link Building: Find Dead Links and Win Them Back

By Islam Ramadan, SEO and GEO Specialist · Last updated: October 9, 2026

What Is Broken Link Building?

The tactic is legitimate. You are improving someone’s page, and the site owner decides freely whether to link. It also includes a faster variant: reclaiming broken links that already point to your own site.

Why Does Broken Link Building Work?

It works because dead links are a real problem that site owners want fixed.

• Pages disappear constantly as sites close, restructure or remove content.
• Broken links frustrate readers and make a page look neglected.
• Most owners do not know which of their links have died.
• You arrive with both the problem and a solution.

Compare it with a cold request for a link, which offers the recipient nothing. Here, you do them a small favour first.

Step 1: How Do You Find Broken Links?

There are four reliable methods.

Start from dead pages in your field

Find a well-known resource in your industry that no longer exists: a closed company’s guide, a retired tool, a moved study. Use a backlink tool to list every site still linking to it. Each is a prospect.

Check competitors’ broken pages

In a backlink tool, look at a competitor’s “best by links” report, filtered to pages returning a 404. Those dead pages still have links pointing at them.

Scan resource pages

Find resource and “useful links” pages in your niche by searching your topic with words such as “resources” or “useful links”. Run a browser link checker on each page to highlight dead links.

Check pages you already know

Industry associations, universities, libraries and directories keep long lists of links, many of them old.

Step 2: How Do You Qualify Prospects?

Not every broken link is worth pursuing. Keep pages that are:

• Relevant to your subject.
• Maintained: updated in the last couple of years, with a contact.
• Indexed and reasonably visited.
• Editorial: a real page with selected links, not an automatic directory.
• Linking in a context where your page would fit.

Discard abandoned sites, link farms and pages where the broken link was to something you cannot replace.

Step 3: How Do You Check What the Dead Page Contained?

Look at an archived copy. A web archive service usually has snapshots of the page before it disappeared.

Note:

• The topic and scope.
• Why people linked to it: a statistic, a definition, a tool, a checklist?
• The anchor text used by linking sites.
• Its format: article, table, PDF, calculator.

This tells you what a replacement must offer.

Step 4: What Should the Replacement Page Contain?

The replacement must serve the same purpose as the original, for the same reader, at least as well.

• Cover the same ground. If people cited a statistic, your page needs a current, sourced figure.
• Be up to date. This is your advantage over a dead page.
• Be your own work. Do not copy the archived page; that is someone else’s content.
• Be non-commercial in tone. Resource pages link to guides and tools, rarely to sales pages.
• Be accurate and sourced.
• Load quickly and read well.

If you have no suitable page, decide whether one is worth creating. It is, when many good sites link to the dead resource and the topic fits what you do. Google’s people-first content guidance is the standard: the page should exist because it is useful, not only to collect links.

Step 5: How Do You Write the Pitch?

Keep it short, specific and helpful.

1. Name the page where the broken link is.
2. Identify the dead link exactly: its text and where it appears.
3. Offer your replacement, with one line on why it fits.
4. Make no demands.

Sample wording

Subject: Broken link on your [topic] resources page

Hello [Name],

I was reading your page on [topic] and noticed that the link to “[anchor text]” in the [section] section no longer works. It leads to an error page.

If you are updating it, we have a current guide that covers the same subject: [URL]. It might be a suitable replacement.

Either way, I thought you would want to know. Thanks for keeping such a useful list.

[Name]

Tips:

• Send to a named person where you can.
• Mention other broken links you found on the page; it shows goodwill.
• Do not paste a template unchanged.
• Do not ask for particular anchor text. See our guide to anchor text.

Step 6: How Do You Follow Up?

Send one polite reminder after about a week. Then leave it. Many site owners fix the link without replying, so check the page a few weeks later.

Record each prospect: page, contact, date sent, reply, link placed. See our guide to link building outreach for tracking and reply rates.

How Do You Reclaim Links to Your Own Broken Pages?

This is the quickest version, and it needs no outreach.

1. In the Search Console Links report, list your top linked pages.
2. Crawl those URLs, and find any that return a 404 or a redirect chain.
3. In a backlink tool, filter your own pages by “404 not found” with referring domains.
4. For each, either restore the page or add a 301 redirect to the closest relevant live page.

The links start working again at once. Google’s redirect guidance explains permanent redirects. Run this check after every redesign or migration.

Related: find unlinked mentions of your brand, and ask for a link. The author already knows you, so success rates are high.

Does Broken Link Building Still Work?

Yes, with realistic expectations. It became widely known, so popular resource pages receive many such emails, and reply rates have fallen compared with its early days.

It still works well when:

• The niche is specific, and fewer people are doing it.
• Your replacement page is truly good.
• The pitch is personal and accurate.
• The dead resource had many links.

It works poorly when the email is a mass template and the “replacement” is a thin page or a sales page.

Is It Within Google’s Guidelines?

Yes. You are asking an editor to link to a relevant page, and they decide. No payment or exchange is involved.

It would cross the line if you offered money or a reciprocal link for the placement. Google’s spam policies treat buying links for ranking and excessive link exchanges as link spam.

Which Mistakes Should You Avoid?

• Pitching a page that does not match the dead one.
• Copying content from the archived page.
• Offering your home page or a product page.
• Vague emails that do not say where the broken link is.
• Reporting a link as broken when it works.
• Repeated follow-ups.
• Ignoring your own broken pages while chasing others’.

For other ways to earn links, see our guides to SEO link building and digital PR.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Guides

• Link Exchange in SEO
• Toxic Backlinks
• Internal Linking for SEO

Sources

1. Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
2. Search Console Help: Links report
3. Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search
4. Google Search Central: Spam policies for Google web search