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Marketing & SEO

July 10, 2024

For Better SEO Find and Steal Competitors’ Broken Backlinks

Marina Turea

As a content project manager, Marina ensures pristine accuracy of content marketing projects delivered on time and...

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Marina Turea

Content Project Manager

As a content project manager, Marina ensures pristine accuracy of content marketing projects delivered on time and within budget and scope. Marina is an experienced content marketing professional with a proven track record of helping both B2B and B2C companies grow their online visibility, leads, and revenue.

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Arriving at a 404 page when you need information can be very frustrating. You immediately have a negative impression of the site and click the exit button to find another site.

Broken links can be disastrous to SEO but a goldmine for competitors. As an experienced SEO agency, we will show you how to steal broken backlinks and improve SEO by:

Finding broken pages with backlinks
Searching for broken pages regarding a topic
Using competitor websites
Locating broken pages from resource pages

Read on for the details of these steps.

Let’s go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

Find Broken Links Related to Your Niche

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The easiest way to find broken pages with backlinks is to find broken links first. Look for such links on websites related to your industry. You can find these websites by either performing a Google search or using paid tools like SpyFu and SEMRush. These tools show you your competitors’ traffic, ranking, and more.

Aside from being a great tool for keyword research, Google can help you check your competitors and find broken links. Simply input your target keyword into Google’s search bar and hit enter. You will get a SERP that lists sites in your niche using this keyword. Copy these competitor URLs into a spreadsheet.

Now that you have a list of your competitors' sites, you can start looking for broken links.

A. Discover Broken Links with Check My Links

Check My Links is a Chrome extension designed to analyze links on a page. It is an easy way to find invalid, broken, or dead links on your competitors’ pages. Simply download it from Google’s extension page and install it. If installed successfully, you should see its icon appear on the upper right hand of your Chrome browser,

Now that you have Check My Links, you can start analyzing your competitors’ pages for broken links.

1. Visit a competitor page. Go back to your list of competitor URLs and click on a link to visit the page.

2. Run Check My Links. While you are on the page, click on the Check My List icon. It will expand to show you how many valid and invalid (broken) links the page has. It will also highlight these links on the page: green for valid and red for invalid links.

3. Collect invalid links. Look for the red highlights and copy the links. On a new spreadsheet, paste and collect these links.

Visit a new page and follow the same steps. Apply these steps to every URL in your list of competitor pages.

B. Discover Broken Links with Wikipedia

As mentioned earlier, Check My Links is just one of several ways to find broken links. Using Wikipedia is another easy way to find broken links.

Wikipedia is a community-maintained resource page. Its individual pages typically contain many links, not to mention a list of references at the bottom of each one. Luckily enough, Wikipedia tags broken links with “dead link.” So, you do not have to click on every link on a page to find out which ones are broken; simply look for the tag.

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Do you have to scour the whole Wikipedia site to find dead links? No, you do not have to do that. You only need the Google operators “site" and “intext” to form the search string:

site:[DOMAIN NAME] + [YOUR KEYWORD] + intext:[KEYWORD]

This search string with the following details:

Wikipedia for the domain name because you only want to see Wikipedia pages
“Cat food” for your keyword so you only see Wikipedia pages talking about cat food.
“Dead link” for the second keyword because you only want to find Wikipedia pages about cat food that have dead links in them. Enclose it in quotation marks so you only get pages with the exact keyword match (no variations) in the SERP.

The search string should look like this:

site:Wikipedia.org cat food intext:”dead link”

So now,

Go to the Google search page
Type site:Wikipedia.org cat food intext:”dead link” and press enter
From the list of Wikipedia pages on the SERP, click on one page
On this page, do a search using CTRL+F and type “dead link.” Do this especially if the page is too long with too many links so that looking for dead link tags is time consuming.
Click on these links to check if they are indeed broken.
Copy the confirmed dead link into a spreadsheet.

Follow the same steps for every Wikipedia page in your SERP. Remember to include in your link only the links that are related to your niche. Since the page is broken, the URL should give you an idea of what the page was supposed to be about. Keywords are commonly found in URLs.

Analyze Broken Pages with SEMrush

SEMrush_Stuttgart, Germany - 09-25-2022: Person holding mobile phone with logo of US search engine marketing company SEMrush Inc. on screen in front of web page. Focus on phone display. Unmodified photo.

Now you have a list of invalid or broken links. The next step is to find which pages are indeed broken pages with backlinks or other sites linking back to them. These are the pages we want to “steal,” and to find them, you will need SEMrush Backlink Analytics.

Go back to your list of broken links and choose one that you will check on SEMRush
Go to SEMRush Backlink Analytics and paste the URL on the analyze bar. Click “Analyze” or simply hit enter.
Look at the number in Backlinks from the window that pops up after the tool is done analyzing the page. A large number of backlinks to this broken page means this is a page worth creating replacement content for.
Copy this URL into a new spreadsheet. This time, it is for your content planning.

Repeat these steps for the remaining URLs on your list of broken links.

Craft Your Replacement Page

According to Google's John Mueller, links remain one of the most important ranking factors. Therefore, creating replacement content for broken pages that have backlinks to them is worth it if you want to improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

A replacement page is a new page that you will add to your website to cover and replace the content of the broken page. It will have comprehensive, updated, and helpful content.

When you have made a list of broken pages that have enough backlinks to be worth fixing, you can start creating your new content. Make certain that you:

1. Apply advanced SEO techniques appropriate for your business

2. Add linkable points in your content to produce outreach angles.

3. Perform replacement page outreach by pitching your replacement page to people linking to the broken page. You can email them and offer your content as a better and more updated page.

Summing Up

High-value broken backlinks can be found in broken pages with backlinks, sites related to your topic, competitor websites, and resource pages. After successfully locating broken backlinks, screen and create a suitable replacement page. Finally, pitch your replacement content to people who linked to the broken page.

Follow these broken link-building strategies, and you can successfully find and steal your competitor's links for better SEO ranking.

Do you want to know more about broken link building? Contact your expert SEO partner, Digital Authority Partners, today.