What is an SEO-ance?

One of the best ways to drum up backlinks to your online content is by finding and replacing dead links on other sites. By finding dead links to related content, you’re already more than halfway to building a link back to your site. The link is already there on another site, just waiting to have a working piece of content connected to it. You can be that piece of live content. In the spirit of Halloween, we’ll call that an SEO-ance!

Find and Replace Dead Backlinks

This process consists of three basic steps.

1. Find broken backlinks
2. Make sure you have content that fits the need of the link
3. Reach out to the site with the broken link and offer up your content to replace their broken content

These three steps usually manifest in two different ways: Either you have content that you want to drum up backlinks for, so you search for those topics specifically; or, you have a general topic that you want to build more backlinks for, so you specifically create content that fits a broken link you’ve found. The latter version works better if you’ve found a high-profile (for your niche) link that you want to fill. The first method works better for farming numerous links.

Finding Broken Links

There are many resources to help with the process of finding broken links. There’s a great chrome extension, LinkMiner, that will point out broken links on pages. Use your search engine knowledge to find useful pages of resources, or specific content links that relate to your niche. You’ve probably viewed some of these pages before during your market research.

So, say you find a list of resources that are similar to your content. Run the LinkMiner over the page to see if any of the resource links are broken. If they are, take a look at what that resource was. Can’t tell just from the link? Check out the internet archive known as The Wayback Machine. Check the broken link and see what content used to live there.

Replacing Broken Links

Once you know what content they used to link to, check to see if you have a piece of content that fits the bill. If you do, reach out to the site and ask them if they’d be interested in a new resource to replace their broken link (thus helping their SEO). If you don’t, you may want to consider creating it, or touching up and old piece of content so that it fits their need more specifically.

Congratulations! You brought a link back from the dead! And you don’t have to worry about it trying to eat your brains.

Need a hand with your SEO strategy? Give us a shout!