Why dead links are worth finding
On your own pages a dead link is a small credibility leak: the reader hits an error and the page looks unmaintained. On somebody else's page it is an opening. The owner has a gap where a useful link used to be, and if you have a working page on the same subject, you have something to offer. That is broken link building: find the dead link, check what it used to say, and suggest your page as the replacement.
What this finds
- Broken pages. The address answers 404 (not found) or 410 (gone), or the server errors out.
- Redirects to a homepage. The old address forwards to the site's front page. The content is gone and the visitor lands somewhere unrelated, so it counts as broken here.
- Domains that no longer exist. The name doesn't resolve at all. Often the site was abandoned or the registration lapsed. Look up whether the name is free before you assume anything.
- Links we could not check. Some sites refuse automated requests (401, 403, 429, 999) or time out. That is not proof of a dead link, so open them by hand.
How to use it for link building
- Pick pages built to link out: resource lists, “useful links”, link roundups and old guides in your niche.
- Scan one and look at the Broken group. Click Wayback next to a dead link to see what it covered.
- If you have a page that covers the same ground, say so. Don't pitch a page that only loosely matches.
- Copy the outreach message, add your replacement page above and send it to the page owner. Keep it short: list the dead links, then offer your page.
How it works
We read the page's HTML, take every link that leaves the site, and open each one the way a browser would, following up to five redirects. Each address is checked once however many times it is linked. A page with several hundred links takes about a minute. We only check public addresses, and we check up to 300 links per scan.
What it cannot see
Links that a script adds after the page loads aren't in the HTML we read, so a page built entirely in the browser may show few or no links. A page that answers 200 but says “not found” in its text (a soft 404) looks healthy to any automated check, including this one. And a link that works for us can still fail for a visitor in another country.