You find a dead link on someone's website.
You tell them about it.
You offer a replacement — one that happens to be your content.
They fix their page. You get a backlink.
That's broken link building. It is one of the few link building tactics where you are genuinely doing the other person a favour. And that changes everything about the outreach dynamic.
Most link building asks for something with nothing in return.
"Hey, I'd love a link." Great. Why should they care?
Broken link building flips the script. You lead with value. There is a problem on their site — a dead link that hurts their readers and, in a small way, their SEO. You spotted it. You're letting them know. And by the way, here's something that could replace it.
The webmaster wins. You win.
That is why response rates for broken link building are consistently higher than cold outreach. When I run these campaigns for clients, I typically see reply rates of 15–30%, compared to 5–10% for standard link requests.
Not every reply turns into a link. But many do.
Before you start finding broken links, get three things in order.
Your target niche. You are looking for websites in a specific topic area — the same area your content covers. A broken link on a cooking blog is useless to a cybersecurity company.
Your content. Broken link building only works if you have something worth linking to. Either you have existing content that fits, or you create a replacement. More on that below.
A prospecting tool. You need a way to find broken links at scale. The manual approach is too slow.
There are three main approaches. Use all three.
Ahrefs is the fastest way to find broken link opportunities at scale.
Here's the workflow:
You can also use Ahrefs Content Explorer to find broken pages in your niche:
Those are your prospects.
Check My Links is a free Chrome extension. Install it, open any page, and it highlights all broken links in red.
This is the manual approach. Slow for scale, but useful for:
Go to a resource page in your niche. Run Check My Links. Export the broken URLs. Done.
Screaming Frog crawls entire websites and reports all broken links.
Use it when you want to audit a specific high-value site in detail. Crawl the domain, filter by 4xx response codes, export the list.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs. That's enough for most mid-sized sites.
Not every site with broken links is worth targeting.
Run each prospect through a quick qualification checklist before you spend time on outreach.
Does this site cover the same topic as your content? A broken link about "best hiking gear" on a travel site is only relevant if your replacement content is also about hiking gear.
Irrelevant sites get low reply rates and the links are worth less even if you do get them.
Use Ahrefs or Moz to check the site's Domain Rating (DR) or Domain Authority (DA). You want sites with a score of at least 30–40 for the effort to be worthwhile.
Sites with DR under 20 exist in huge numbers but rarely move the needle for your rankings.
Open the site. Does it look like a real website? Is it maintained? Is there actual editorial content, or is it a thin affiliate site plastered in ads?
Real sites run by real people are far more likely to respond and to maintain the link long-term.
Are you already targeting this site through another campaign? Check your CRM or spreadsheet before adding it to your outreach queue.
Here's where many beginners go wrong.
They find the broken link. They check the anchor text. They pitch their homepage.
That's lazy and it does not work.
The replacement content needs to be a genuine match for what the broken link was pointing to. If the broken URL was /resources/best-project-management-books then your pitch needs to point to content that covers project management books or resources.
You have two options.
Search your site for content that genuinely covers the same topic as the broken link. If the match is strong, use it.
Do not stretch. If your content is only tangentially related, you are wasting your time and theirs.
Sometimes the opportunity is big enough to justify creating something new.
You find 15 sites all linking to the same broken resource. You create a better, updated version of that resource. Now you have a pitch that is directly on-point for all 15 sites.
This is the most effective version of broken link building — and the most work. Save it for opportunities with 10+ potential linking sites.
This is where it all comes together.
Your email needs to do three things:
Keep it short. Nobody reads long cold emails.
Here's a template that works:
Subject: Broken link on [page title or URL]
Hi [first name],
I was reading your article on [topic] at [URL of their page] and noticed one of the links is broken — it points to [broken URL] which now returns a 404 error.
I actually have a resource that covers the same topic and might be a good replacement: [your URL]
Happy to help either way — just thought I'd let you know about the broken link.
[Your name]
That's it. No flattery. No long intro about who you are. No "I hope this email finds you well."
Just: here's the problem, here's a possible fix, take it or leave it.
A few notes on the template:
Your subject line determines whether the email gets opened at all.
These consistently work:
Avoid:
I will be straight with you.
Not everyone replies. Not everyone who replies will add your link. And not everyone who says they will actually follow through.
Here's what you can realistically expect with well-qualified, well-executed broken link building:
So if you send 100 targeted emails, you might get 20–30 replies and 8–15 links.
That sounds modest. But these are real links from real sites that you earned by providing genuine value. They are not paid links. They are not spun content dropped on a PBN. They will hold up.
For context: standard cold outreach for link requests usually converts at 2–5%. Broken link building at 8–15% is significantly better.
Running one small campaign is fine. Running five large ones in parallel is where broken link building gets genuinely powerful.
Here's the scaling playbook.
Set up Ahrefs alerts for broken pages in your niche. Every time a major resource goes offline and has significant backlinks pointing to it, you want to know about it quickly.
Check Content Explorer weekly. Build a running list of opportunities.
At scale, you need to track:
A spreadsheet works. Pitchbox, BuzzStream, or Hunter.io's campaigns feature works better.
The most important word in the previous sentence is "templates." Not "blasts."
Broken link building does not work as a mass blast. The personalisation — naming the specific page, naming the specific broken URL — is what makes it land.
You can use templates to speed up the writing. You still need to customise each email before you send it.
A single follow-up email, sent 4–7 days after the first, recovers a meaningful number of non-replies.
Keep it short:
Hi [name], just checking in on my previous email about the broken link on your [page title]. Happy to help if it's still useful.
That is all. Do not send three follow-ups. Do not guilt them. One follow-up, then move on.
Let's be honest about the limitations.
When your replacement content is a poor fit. If the broken link was pointing to a detailed guide and your replacement is a thin blog post, you will not get the link.
When the site is abandoned. Lots of websites with broken links have not been updated in years. Nobody is reading their email. Do not waste time on them.
When the broken link is buried deep. A broken link on a page with no traffic and no backlinks is not worth much even if you get it. Prioritise broken links on high-traffic pages.
When you're in a very small niche. Broken link building requires volume. If your niche has 30 relevant sites, there may not be enough broken links to build a campaign around.
How does it compare to the alternatives?
| Tactic | Effort | Scalability | Link quality | Risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broken link building | Medium | Medium | High | Low |
| Resource page outreach | Medium | Medium | High | Low |
| Guest posting | High | Low | High | Low |
| HARO | Low | Low | Very high | Low |
| Digital PR | Very high | High | Very high | Low |
Broken link building sits in a sweet spot: lower effort than guest posting, higher quality than most bulk tactics, and genuinely white hat.
It is also one of the best gateway tactics to learn if you are newer to link building strategies — the feedback loop is fast, the outreach is simple, and the results are measurable.
Use this before and during every campaign.