I listened to a webinar today where Garrett French spoke briefly about broken link building. Listening to Garrett and the other link builders speak about broken link building as something they kinda sorta sometimes do, made me realise – holy moly, I do a lot of broken link building. In fact, it’s basically the cornerstone of my outreach and link building work.
Why I love broken link building.
I love broken link building because it’s how link building should be. It’s about being useful, it’s about sharing information and about fixing the internet. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when I get a link live from this activity. If I get a link live, I’ve solved an issue for the webmaster and I’ve built a lovely relevant link for my client. It just feels so damn good.
Because I love it so much, it makes it an easy thing for me to convince clients to do. It’s also whitehat, results in the acquisition of relevant links from aged pages and is scalable. All awesome stuff.
How I get around the frustrations.
The issue with broken link building is that it is dependent on a few things which, more often than not, do not align:
- the client needs content which is useful enough to be used for the activity
- this content also needs to be a worthwhile replacement for the content on the broken page/site you’re stealing links from
- this broken content also needs to have a good number of links from the kind of sites you want links from, otherwise you could spend all of this time planning the work and end up with nothing to show for it (no links is no fun).
With all of these factors considered, I wasn’t surprised to hear Debra Mastaler (another of the link builders on the panel) describe broken link building as a “one off project”. Looking at the above bullet points, it really does feel like the stars need to align for broken link building to work.
Or do they?…..no. The answer is no.
“Cornerstone content” and other guru stuff.
It almost makes me feel like an influencer when I come up with terms like this.
“Cornerstone Content” is a long piece of evergreen content that sits on a client site, purely built for the acquisition of links through broken link building. The content should be related to the niche that the client sits in, and the content should take the form of a single page navigable through anchor links. I use the word “cornerstone” to describe the content because I feel the content should demonstrate your understanding of your industry and should be something you can truly hang your hat on. It’ll be information heavy and it’ll demonstrate your authority within your industry. The content will be based on the content you’ve found on broken pages/sites that you want to steal links from. Does that all make sense?
Cornerstone content eliminates a lot of the issues which make broken link building seem so yucky. By including content intended to replace lots of different broken links and pages rather than just one, it becomes much easier to get results from this activity.
So how do you create one of these cornerstone content thingys? Well, get ready to do a buttload of prospecting, scraping and general internet trawling.
Pick your topic.
The first thing you need to decide on is what your topic will be. The best thing here is to be as broad as you can with your topic, because that means you can fit more content into your cornerstone content. The more content you can fit into your piece, the more links you’ll get.
I quite often like to base the topic on any broken pages/sites I’ve found on my previous internet travels (I keep a note of any I stumble across). So if I’ve got a little stash of broken hotel websites, I might create a cornerstone content piece about ‘the best luxury locations in the world’ (using the term ‘locations’ opens it up so that I could include anything in this list – resorts, cities, beaches etc. quite clever isn’t it?)
Prospect like a boss.
Even if you have a little stash of broken pages/sites already, you’re gonna need a whole lot more. That’s why the prospecting is so important.
I think prospecting is the best part of this entire process because it is genuinely good fun. Your job is to find as many broken pages/sites related to your topic as you can. So sticking with the ‘luxury locations’ theme, here are some ideas of what I might do:
- Find a directory of hotels which includes external links to hotel websites, chuck it in Ahrefs and check for broken outbound links.
- Find a Wikipedia page for a city and check the external links section for anything broken. Then put the Wikipedia page in the WaybackMachine and check for external links which were on the page previously but have now been removed (chances are they were removed because they were broken)
- Find a well linked to hotel website, then look for ‘top 10’ type articles it has been featured in over 3 years ago and see if the other hotels included in the article still have their websites live
- Find a hotel chain with a large number of hotels across the world, put the website in Ahrefs and sort by ‘best by links’, then by ‘404’. Lots of nice 404 pages with lots of nice links.
Get the idea?
Sidenote – you’ll notice that I’m focusing mostly on finding business websites for this post. You might think using business websites for broken link building would be ineffective. After all, people would rather link to the official site right? Well in certain cases, it doesn’t really matter to them whether it’s the official business website or a page giving information about the business. This is where the context of the link matters. If the link is surrounded by text along the lines of ‘for booking information, head here’, then it’s unlikely your article about the hotel would be a good replacement. However, if the link is surrounded by text which is less transactional and more informational, then it doesn’t need to be the official business website to provide the reader with context. So go for it. Of course, you can always prospect a mix of broken business sites/pages and informational sites/pages for your cornerstone content. That’s the beauty of it.
Format it properly.
You’ve decided on your topic, you’ve got the broken sites/pages, now you need to put it all together properly. Your cornerstone content is going to be mentioning lots of different information, and if you’re offering your content to prospects as a replacement for the broken site/page they’re linking to, you need to make sure they can find the appropriate replacement content quickly and easily. That’s why we use anchor links.
The topic of each broken site/page you’ve found will form a separate section of your piece. So if we found broken pages about the Mallard Hotel, the Ritz Carlton and the Malmaison London, we’d have these as separate sections and anchor link to each as #mallard, #ritzcarlton and #malmasionlondon.
Each section would include a nice image of the location (Creative Commons of course), and a short overview of what it is about. Nothing too fancy here – keep the language informative and to the point.
Lastly, try to make the piece look nice if you can. I’ve heard that people like gifs and cats.
Keep going
The absolute beauty of cornerstone content is that there is no end to the amount of content you can add to it, so consequently there is no end to the amount of links you could acquire. Sticking with the locations piece, I’ve started with luxury hotels and resorts but could easily add a section about natural locations, bars, yoga retreats, harbours, golf courses, restaurants. And suddenly it’s a 10,000 word post about luxury locations which on it’s own could get you links. Pretty awesome right?
Also, it’s great for clients who aren’t fully bought into link building yet. I only need access to 1 page on their website to create a cornerstone content piece. 1 page! And that is all I need for the entirety of their link building campaign!
So, are you now bought into broken link building like I am? Hopefully. Because I’ve just opened my heart up to you and I don’t want to be hurt again.
If you want to learn more about broken link building, I have a chunky course which I believe to be the best resource about this topic you can find. If you’re interested then drop us a message.
