Broken link building: finding dead links your competitors left behind

Key takeaways

• Broken link building finds dead links on relevant sites and offers your page as a working replacement.
• Opportunities keep appearing: Pew Research found 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone a decade later, and 23% of news pages contained at least one broken link.
• Competitor pages that were removed or moved leave behind backlinks you can offer to replace.
• The replacement must genuinely serve the same purpose as the dead resource.
• Short, helpful outreach that leads with the problem gets better responses than a generic link request.

Broken link building works because it solves a problem for the person you contact. Instead of asking for a favor, you point out a dead link on their page and suggest a working resource. This Emulent guide covers how to find opportunities, create replacement content, write outreach and scale the process.

How do you find broken link opportunities?

Look where dead links collect on pages relevant to your content. The web loses pages constantly: Pew’s 2024 study, When Online Content Disappears, found a quarter of pages from 2013 to 2023 were no longer accessible, and Ahrefs’ link rot study found at least 66.5% of links to sites over nine years had rotted.

• Check competitor backlink profiles in Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz for pages returning 404 that still have referring domains.
• Crawl industry resource pages, roundups and link lists for broken outbound links.
• Track businesses and publications in your niche that shut down or let domains expire, then find who linked to them.
• Monitor your own site for removed pages that still receive links, and redirect them to the closest live page before pursuing anyone else’s.

Competitor 404s are often the most productive source: you know the topic, you can see who linked and you can build a better replacement.

How do you create replacement content that earns the link?

Make it a true substitute, then make it better.

• Check what the dead page contained in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
• Match its purpose and format: a guide for a guide, a tool for a tool, a dataset for a dataset.
• Improve on it with current figures, newer examples, clear structure and sources.

Do not copy the original. Use it to understand what linkers valued, then write your own version.

How do you write outreach for broken link replacement?

Lead with their problem, offer one option and keep it short.

• Name the page on their site and the exact broken URL so they can verify it quickly.
• Suggest your page as one possible replacement, not a demand.
• Keep the email to three to five sentences.
• Ask only for the replacement, not extra links or shares.
• Follow up once, then move on.

Never offer payment for the change; links exchanged for money must carry sponsored or nofollow attributes under Google’s spam policies, which defeats the purpose and adds risk.

How do you scale broken link building?

Turn discovery and outreach into a routine.

• Check top competitors’ backlink profiles monthly for newly broken pages.
• Build a library of strong evergreen resources that can replace many types of dead links.
• Use outreach templates for structure, but personalize each email with the specific page and link.
• Track response rates by source type, such as resource pages, blog posts and educational sites, and focus on what converts.

Broken link building works best as one channel within an enterprise SEO link program, alongside research, digital PR and partnerships.

How can the Emulent team help?

Emulent runs broken link programs for enterprise and B2B clients, monitoring competitors for opportunities, creating replacement resources and handling outreach. A caveat: site owners decide whether to update their pages, and many never reply, so treat this as a regular supplement rather than your only source of links. Contact the Emulent team to start reclaiming dead links.