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Best Link Building Strategy of 2013 and 2014 – Modified Broken Link Building

Palla Sridhar

Good old link building sites, article directories, reciprocal link building are gone in 2014. Until 2012, it was easy to rank for any particular keyword. All you have to do is buy 500 or 1000 low profile backlinks and use common anchor text to point to a particular web page and hola, you will rank on #1 page in Google.

But with Penguin, Humming Bird and other latest algorithm updates, Google heavily penalized on spammy link building sites. The best link building strategy in 2014 is that you write quality and good content and wait for editorial backlinks to happen.

But what about SEO? Then there is no manual link-building! Also what about small websites and small blog owners? Can’t they grasp the Holy Grail of Google #1 page ranking ?

Currently there are some strategies which you can use to rank well using these link building techniques. This is called “Modified Broken Link Building“.

What is Broken Link Method of Building Links?

First of all as I found on many websites, this type of link building is white-hat. So you need not worry that Google is going to penalize you for such strategy.

Also, this method is used my many SEO experts and agencies. So you can rest assured that this thing is going to work in your favor if its built in the right way and with the right intentions.

The 3 steps in this method are –

• Search for Broken Links on Websites or Blogs in your Niche
• Finding Potential Web Pages with Broken Links
• Email the WebMaster for a Link

Thats it! The steps looks simple. But how do you execute them? You have several simple questions in your mind. Do I have to check links manually? How to find sites that have broken links? How to approach web masters with a link request?

How to Find Web Pages with Broken Links?

Most of the times you will find these back links on resource pages. To find these, you can use these footprints in Google.

“Your keyword” + inurl:links
“Your keyword” + inurl:resources

For example you want to find resources for “backlinks in 2014” you can do a search in Google like this.

How to find broken link resources through Google

I took one of the sites out of the search results and started checking for “backlinks”.

How to Search for Broken Links on Web Pages or Sites or Blogs?

As you have observed finding sites with broken links was easy. In order to find the broken links on pages of these sites, you need to use a Chrome extension.

With this extension I checked a web page from the Google search results above. There I found lot of broken link errors of 503.

As you can observe from above results, there 39 broken links on this page.  The red mark shows them. These are potential backlinks for your sites in your niche. It takes only 1 minute to check each page and 30 minutes of your time can be used to find such resources.

Approach WebMasters with a Link Request – Tips

Now the major part is over. You now have to convince the web master of that site, to replace the broken URL with a valid URL from your OWN SITE. 

The following tips will be useful in building a rappo with the blog or site owner.

1. Give them an heads up that you found a broken link on their website and present yourself as a business owner that works in their niche industry. Make them know of the potential benefits of linking the broken URL with your web page URL.
2. Concentrate on helping the web master, rather then trying to be a SEO expert. Fulfill their requests and focus on their difficulties.
3. You can act like an enthusiast fan of their website and are genuinely interested in making amends for their site. This really helps to build a bond with the web master.
4. Don’t make the email look spammy and try to find the web master name and be genuine in putting a request.

One of the SEO writers have mentioned a metric that, 30% of the web masters will send you a thank you message and 10% will be willing to put a link back to your site.

Hope you got the strategy of 2014 and 2013.

What is Modified Broken Link Building Strategy?

The only difference between the earlier method and this new strategy is that the broken links are not really “broken“. For example if you read this post on this new method of back-linking, you can find a case-study on how the author was able to find really good back-links.

For example, SEOMoz.org which was a good SEO company got re-branded itself as Moz.org. The author tried to find back-links pointing to the old domain and did a back-link profile check on web-pages pointing to this old-domain.

SEO Tools showed that the links are not broken (which is different from the broken link building strategy). But the URL has changed. So now you get lot of opportunities asking web masters to replace the old URLs with the ones of YOUR site.

Conclusion

In essence, this was a new link building strategy to me in 2013. But with half the year gone in 2014, I am trying to build links using this method. I will put another report on how I am successful with this white-hat scheme and give the benefits in another post.

If you liked this post, share this in your SEO circles and tell blog owners and budding bloggers on how they can reap benefits from such a link building strategy in 2014.