How to Create Backlinks with the Broken Link Building Technique [OSEO-10]

Hello guys, this is Tim Solo from Ahrefs and today I want to answer the question how to get a backlink from a website. You're watching episode number 10 of the oversimplified SEO. In previous episodes I showed you how to identify sites that help your competitors rank well. But now that you know the sites, how do you make them to link to you? Don't stop watching! Okay, let's say I want a backlink from copyblogger.com, which is a pretty famous blog about copywriting. And as you can see from Ahrefs toolbar, it has domain rating of 70, which is a pretty solid number. Since copyblogger is actually a blog, the first thing that comes to my mind is to write a guest post for them and have a link to my website from this guest post. But that's not very efficient, because this way I'll have to write a solid piece of content and I won't even leave it to myself, because it will be published at copyblogger. And I actually know a better way when I can write a piece of content and have a link from copyblogger while keeping the content to myself. And as usual, I'm going to need some help from Ahrefs tools. So I open Ahrefs Site Explorer and put the copyblogger.com domain name there. Site Explorer tool allows me to find out if copyblogger.com website is linking to some content that no longer exists. And as you know from my previous episode, I can check it with the broken links report of Site Explorer. As you can see, there are 2,210 broken links on copyblogger.com website. But I'm interested in DoFollow links, because these probably link to some quality pieces of content that no longer exist. So this is their list of DoFollow broken links. And actually, as you can see, the very first broken link looks interesting. It seems to be an article with top 10 blogs for writers. Let's open it and see if it actually exists or not. Nope, this article returns 404 not found error. By looking at the URL of this article, I can tell that this was a list of top 10 blogs for writers. And there's actually a way to restore this article and check what was there when it was live. We can use the amazing service called archive.org and check for previous snapshots of this page. For example, a snapshot from 2010. Let's see if the article was live at the time. Yes, this is the original piece of content that guys from copyblogger were linking to. So what I could do is write a top 10 blogs for writers article on my own blog and then reach out to copyblogger and tell them that they have a broken link and they can change it to a live link with the pretty much same article, but maybe even a better one on my own website. This tactic is known as broken link building and it's pretty popular among SEOs. And what I personally like about it is that you're keeping a piece of content to yourself while getting a backlink from a powerful website. But here's another great thing that I love about broken link building. I'm sure that copyblogger website is not the only one who is linking to this dead article. So what I'm going to do is check for other sites that might link to this page. I take the URL of this page, open another instance of Site Explorer and search for backlinks to this URL. As you can see, there are 27 sites that link to this piece of content that is no longer there. And to see them, I just go to referring domains report of Site Explorer. So once I recreate this piece of content on my own blog, I can reach out to all 27 sites and let them know that they have a broken link and that they can update it with a link to a similar resource on my own site. To be honest, I don't believe that I will be able to make all 27 sites to update their dead link with a link to my article, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make at least five of them to link to me, which is a pretty good result from a single piece of content. And then I would go back to broken links of copyblogger, find another cool piece of content that no longer exists but has many other websites still linking to it, and again I would recreate it on my blog and reach out to all the guys and have them link to me. As you can see, there are 740 potential opportunities for broken link building on copyblogger alone. And I'm sure even in your niche there are tons of sites that have broken links, which is a great opportunity for you to create awesome content on your site and have them update their broken links and link to you. That's it! I hope you enjoyed this little broken link building trick and I encourage you to go and try it on your own site right now. And if you have any questions about SEO that you want me to answer in one of the next episodes of Oversimplified SEO, please send them to my mailbox at teamsolo.ahrefs.com. See you in the next episode!