You’re going to need:
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (free for searches of 500 links at a time)
- Google account
- Ahrefs account (to use Site Explorer)
You’re going to need:
Use this template: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jQirKt3N1seiV-2KWHcTXI2iDywyg0U_IxggtQWe1E0/pub?output=csv
Make a copy in your own account.
You’ll notice it has 2 tabs, one for process and one for unprocessed.
You will be working first in the unprocessed tab, dumping in the information quickly before moving it into the processed section and completing it with email address and other specifics.
Feel free to edit your copy of the template so it includes more branched links (instances of a single broken URL found linked in multiple places on the web).
Attached below is the template in case you’d rather use it in Excel.
Your search terms should be based on the content you want to give backlinks to, so should be relevant. If you’re trying to rank your productivity app, for example, you might want to look for lists of productivity tools and see if any of the tools have been discontinued. For this, you’ll build a list of potential queries like this:
Read more about queries for broken link building here — they suggest queries such as:
Broken link scraping is about covering a ton of ground, not about being careful. Get to it by shoving your first query into Google, opening the first page up and copying the URLs into a text document.
For a quicker method, put your query in Ninja SEO Tools’ Google URL Scraper and get all of the results as a text file for less time spent copy-pasting.
Now you should have several Google results (99 in one go if you used the Ninja SEO Tool I mentioned).
Open up your list next to SEO Spider, and start pasting in.
Make sure you have SEO Spider configured in ‘Spider’ mode, and select the ‘4xx’ filter from the righthand menu:
Fill in links in the ‘unprocessed’ tab for every broken link.
Around 100 seed links should do for a campaign.
Ahrefs Site Explorer will show you all sites which link to your newly discovered broken URL.
Go to Site Explorer and search your link, making sure you’ve got ‘URL’ selected on the dropdown.
Hopefully, for every URL you find you’ll find several unfortunate sites linking to it. These are the main targets.
Click ‘Backlinks’ inside Ahrefs to filter down results to show sites that are pointing to your broken link:
In Sheets, you’ll see the ‘Also linked from’ columns. For however many backlinks there are listed there, list them in their own column on the row that’s for the seed broken link, like this:
Continue building out the ‘Unprocessed’ section of your sheet by finding sites that link TO the broken URLs we originally found.
Now you’ll be left with a sheet with hundreds of broken links, it’s time to move them over to the ‘Processed’ sheet and find the contact details for every site owner with a broken link you want to replace.
For every broken link, make a new column in the Processed tab and build it out until it’s done. Then, use the process I’m going to link below to find their email addresses:
How to Find Almost Anyone’s Email Address
After you’ve filled in the emails, go ahead and progress to the next template: