STOP Wasting Time On Broken Link Building! (Here's Why) (Ep. 212)

Key Takeaways

people often talk about broken link building as if it's a tactic on the same level as guest posting or skyscraper but i think the seo industry needs to come clean of it like is anyone actually doing broken link building consistently at scale [Music] the reason i bring this up is i was actually doing or trying to do a lesson for authority hacker pro to to talk about it it's been a long time since we've really explored it ourselves but certain people have been asking for it um and so we we started looking for some examples in all sorts of different niches of uh broken links you could uh try and target but honestly it was just impossible to find we looked at about 250 different uh websites and every kind of niche you can imagine and i've come to the conclusion that it's just it's an almost pointless tactic and you shouldn't waste your time with it so i'm making this short podcast instead to tell you that i think the reason why it doesn't work is because in or broken link building essentially reply relies on you finding a site or a page on a site which had a lot of links and that site that page has maybe been taken down or or whatever now in the vast majority of cases when a site which is big enough to have a lot of links pointing to it takes down a page they probably know a thing or two about seo and they're gonna know to redirect the page or they're gonna we're gonna figure that out it's really your only chance with broken lingville is capturing the people who are like big enough and maybe got lucky and got links to some page and for some magical reason don't have it and haven't remembered to go and redirect it or been told by someone else so basically this like almost never happens uh so i think that as a tactic you know people people talk about a lot but like who is actually doing this do you know anyone gail no i think the problem is it's it's kind of like fed by the newbie right so the way people approaching building is they feel they need a hundred tactics so they can build enough things like they don't realize that you know like guest posting is this big and broken in building is this small but when uh because people want a list of tactics what happens is people give them a list of tactics so if you google link building tactics for example what you get you get a giant guess at least post with like 100 tactics and all these tactics are put on the same level like people will put as i said broken link building with together with guest posting and about the same amount of content is going to be written about it and what it does is it distorts the vision of people about these tactics they end up seeing them as equal it's like you know what it makes me think about it makes me think about climate change um i'm gonna take another another video because yeah because you know what happens when when television does a debate about climate change they bring one scientist that believes in climate change and bring one scientist that doesn't believe in climate change and what happens is people realize that like well like how the people how the scientists must believe that climate change doesn't exist then not really 99 of scientists believe in climate change but because of the way it's portrayed to the masses to make it more interesting as a format people actually get a very distorted vision of reality and uh and that's exactly what happens with broken building and a lot of [ __ ] tactics to be honest uh and that messes up with newbies because they waste their time instead of understanding that the key to link building is getting really good at one or two of these and that's it yeah and the only way to do that to get really good at one link building tactic is like repetition and like just small improvements but it's boring learning over and over and over again yeah as especially like as an entrepreneur it's like you kind of figured that that out uh and like you've solved the problem kind of and it's just like a slow grind after that which is kind of boring so you you want to like oh what else can i add into this what what else can i yeah people think that they're gonna get better by doing everything it's funny because there's this um this member of h pro uh cincy on the that person on the group today that made his first money like first few first on amazon or something and uh it's funny because he posted a screenshot of the chat i had with him at some point which i told him like you're trying to do everything you're trying to do instagram you're trying to do seo you're trying to do like info products and affiliate and everything and this is not what the world rewards like everyone is a jack-of-all-trade and the world wants more specialists they want people who are really [ __ ] good at one thing even if they ignore the rest of their life if you think about the most successful people in the world that's what they do warren buffet he just learned investing and he learned to be an investor it's like i mean apart from elon musk maybe that just does rockets and tesla um i can't really think of people who didn't focus it's not ideas it's execution that you need to be worrying about and and link building is the same you need to worry about how you're executing on on one or two or a handful of ideas you don't need 50 different tactics to be to be working on you know just get back to the broken link building case i think one real big problem with it if you are magically able to find an opportunity it's that in the vast majority of cases these the links are pointing to a page that you can't replicate so it'll be it'll say you know uh brian from such and such home depot repair dot info or whatever said said this and they'll be they'll be quoting someone specifically or talking about something someone did or i noticed a bunch of recipes examples here where people actually like link stop took the recipe and then uh but they had the full recipe on their site they're still crediting the person but it's like well why would you you couldn't credit someone else because it wasn't them that created it and the content's already on your site so there's no reason to change the link anyway even if it is broken you just won't have it there uh so you have this other kind of problem as well around like what do you do with with that that kind of content you know there is a kind of a small potential angle you can take with um with broken link building but it's not the typical way you approach broken link building it's it's the kind of like shotgun broken building getting as much get your foot in the door and we try this a bit basically just email every site you can find and say hey uh we found a broken link is this the right person uh contact and you know if they reply then you go find a broken link on their site because every site has one or almost every site does um and we we thought oh this would be an amazing way to like get in touch with loads of people and and you know get our get our foot in the door not to replace the broken link with our link but just to say oh hey how about we do a guest post for you as well now that we're chatting um and to be honest it just didn't work you know i think a lot of sites weren't even interested as soon as you flip the the script to guest posting if it wasn't a site that already did guest posting anyway or accepted guest posting there's a lot of savage they're just like no and you could just outreach for that anyway so you know as a tactic um wasn't wasn't very impressed with it and we we tried that maybe we were better just we're just bad we didn't crack it you know i i yeah i mean i i do wonder if it's kind of uh like as more seo tools become prevalent and people are start to become more aware of like problems with their sites and you know just generally seo knowledge increases about like 301s and stuff if that like in the past you know four or five years ago it was there was a lot more opportunities because i do know a few people that that were doing it but again all the examples are like three four five years years ago that i remember so what used to be popular before was like resource pages as well like people having like a list of resources and people don't really do that anymore on blogs and so as a result like um and this is where most opportunities for um broken link building came as well like there was also resource page outrage you would find uh in url resources plus you know like cats or something and then you would find these and you could outreach still i think some kind of like yeah in some kind of like community based uh niches where everyone's like super friendly uh with each other there that happens more often but in the more like heavily monetized competitive spaces where it's like a business blog um you know not so much fair enough all right well let's wrap it up here guys if you enjoy this episode and if you hate uh broken building then give us a like you can subscribe below as well tell us have you had success with broken building we want to see that in the comments uh are we bad at it or serve us wrong yeah we just uh are we right on these letters now because i'm actually wondering um but anyway we'll see you tomorrow for another episode so enjoy and have a good day [Music]