Broken Link Building
In one line
Broken link building is the outreach tactic where you find dead links on other sites and propose your own page as the replacement target.
Going deeper
Broken link building is the outreach play where you find a dead outbound link on another site and politely suggest your own page as the replacement. From the site owner's point of view you are doing them a favour, which is why response rates beat generic cold outreach by a comfortable margin.
Two things drive success. One, your replacement content has to genuinely match the original target topic. Two, the email has to feel like a person wrote it. 'I noticed a broken link on this page — if it fits, our piece could be a replacement' is the tone that consistently works.
Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush surface candidates quickly through their broken backlinks reports. But the limiter is almost always the quality of your replacement page, so a content upgrade often has to come before the outreach itself.
Related terms
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is the classic link-building tactic of contributing content to other sites and earning a natural backlink to your own in the byline or body.
SEOURL Rating (UR) / Page Authority (PA)
URL Rating (Ahrefs) and Page Authority (Moz) are vendor-specific 0-100 scores that estimate the link-equity strength of a single URL — they are page-level metrics from two different tools, not synonyms.
SEOToxic Backlink
A toxic backlink is a low-quality inbound link — from spam, hacked sites, link farms — that can raise penalty risk if left unaddressed.
SEODisavow Tool
The Disavow Tool lets you tell Google to ignore specific backlinks when evaluating your site — a last-resort instrument typically reserved for actual manual actions.
SEO410 Gone
410 Gone is the HTTP status that tells crawlers a page has been permanently removed — clearer than 404, because it explicitly says the page is not coming back.
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