Broken Link Building: How to Earn Backlinks by Replacing Dead Content

Broken link building is a link acquisition technique based on a simple premise: websites accumulate broken links over time as the pages they reference move, are deleted, or go offline. These broken links are a problem for the website owner — they create a poor experience for readers and signal poor maintenance to search engines. By finding these broken links on authoritative sites in your industry, creating or identifying content on your own site that is a genuine replacement for the dead resource, and politely notifying the site owner, you offer something of real value in exchange for a backlink.

At Xpose, broken link building is one of the techniques we use in link acquisition campaigns for clients because it’s grounded in genuine value exchange rather than paying for links or manipulating systems. The site owner benefits by having a broken link fixed; you benefit by earning a link from an authoritative domain. When executed well, the success rate is far higher than cold outreach for generic link requests, because you’re approaching with a clear benefit to offer rather than a request. This guide explains how to find broken link opportunities, how to create or match replacement content, and how to conduct the outreach.

How to Find Broken Link Opportunities

The first step is finding pages that are relevant to your industry and likely to contain outbound links to useful resources. These include resource pages and "links" pages that curate useful references for a given topic, in-depth blog posts and guides that cite external sources, and Wikipedia pages in your subject area (which link extensively to external references). Once you have a list of target pages, you need to identify which outbound links are broken. The Check My Links Chrome extension lets you scan any page instantly and highlights dead links in red. Ahrefs and Semrush both have tools that identify broken outbound links across entire domains, which is more efficient when working with a long list of target sites.

When you find a broken link, investigate what the original page contained. The Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) often has a cached copy of pages that no longer exist, letting you understand the type of content that was linked to. This is essential for the next step — you need to create or identify a page on your site that is a genuine, useful replacement for the dead resource, not just a loosely related page you’re hoping to insert instead.

Creating Replacement Content and Making the Match

The strength of broken link building lies in the relevance and quality of your replacement content. If the dead link was to a comprehensive guide on a topic, your replacement needs to be a comprehensive guide on the same topic — not a sales page or a brief overview. If you already have a page that covers the same ground well, you can use that directly. If not, you’ll need to create the content before running your outreach, which makes this tactic more resource-intensive upfront but significantly more effective than cold outreach with no real asset to offer.

Quality of the linking page matters as much as the existence of the broken link. A broken link on a high-authority, relevant website in your sector is worth significant effort to pursue. A broken link on a low-quality, unrelated site is probably not worth pursuing at all. Prioritise sites with domain authority above 30 (using Ahrefs Domain Rating or Moz Domain Authority as a proxy) and with clear topical relevance to your business. A business serving Norwich businesses should prioritise local and industry-relevant sites over generic international link directories.

Outreach That Gets Responses

Effective broken link building outreach is brief, helpful, and specific. Find the name of the person responsible for the page if possible — editors, authors, and webmasters all respond better to named outreach than to "Dear webmaster." Your email should: identify the specific broken link (including the text and URL so they can find it quickly), acknowledge that broken links happen to everyone, let them know what the dead page contained (if you can establish this via the Wayback Machine), and offer your replacement content as a helpful solution. Keep it to 3–4 sentences — site owners are busy, and a concise, clearly useful email gets a faster response than a lengthy pitch.

Response rates for well-executed broken link building outreach are typically 10–20%, which is significantly higher than generic link requests. Not every response will result in a link — some site owners will thank you and update the link with a different resource — but the conversion rate for those who engage is high because you’ve already identified a clear, specific need. At Xpose, we combine broken link building with competitor link analysis and content gap work to build comprehensive link campaigns that grow client authority across multiple fronts simultaneously, rather than relying on any single tactic.