Broken Link Building in 2026: A Step-by-Step Method With Email Templates

Quick quiz

How should you get links from other websites?

Question 1 of 425%

Does your site already have useful content?

Very littleSome good pagesLots of articles and guides

The web loses pages at a steady pace. A Pew Research Center study published in May 2024 found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later, and that 23% of news pages contain at least one broken link. Every one of those dead links is a gap an editor would rather close. Broken link building turns that gap into a link building opportunity: this guide gives the full method in eight steps, a table of the best sources of dead links, three email templates and the mistakes that get pitches ignored.

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is a white hat link acquisition tactic. You look for outbound links on relevant pages (articles, guides, resource lists) that lead to an error page, usually a 404 or 410, or to a domain that has expired. You then tell the page owner which link is dead and suggest a live page on your site that serves the same purpose. If the editor agrees, they swap the URL and you earn an editorial backlink.

The tactic has two sides. The outbound side covers dead links on other people's pages, whatever site they used to point to. The inbound side, often called link reclamation, covers links that point to pages on your own site that you deleted or moved: you recover them with a redirect instead of an email. A complete campaign starts with the second side because it costs almost nothing, then moves to the first.

Why does broken link building still work?

Three facts keep the tactic effective, even though it has been known for more than a decade.

• Dead links are everywhere and keep appearing. The same Pew study found broken links on 21% of government pages and at least one dead reference link on 54% of Wikipedia pages. Pages move, companies close, sites change their URL structure.
• A dead link is useless to Google and to readers. Google states in its documentation on HTTP status codes that indexed URLs returning a 4xx code are removed from the index and that their content is ignored. The editor loses a source and the reader lands on an error page.
• Your email brings value. Most outreach asks for something. A broken link pitch starts by reporting a problem on the recipient's page, which is why it gets read more often than a cold request for a link.

Its limits are real too: popular dead pages are known to many link builders, editors of large sites receive several pitches for the same link, and some pages are no longer maintained at all. Volume and precision matter more than with other tactics.

How to do broken link building in 8 steps

1. Reclaim your own broken backlinks first

Export the backlinks of your site from Google Search Console (Links report) or from a backlink analysis tool and check the status code of each target URL. Every link that points to a deleted or renamed page on your site should be fixed with a 301 redirect to the closest live page. This is the fastest win of the whole method: no email, no negotiation. A regular backlink audit catches these cases before they pile up.

2. Find dead pages on competitor sites

List the sites that rank on your topics and look at their pages that return a 404 but still receive backlinks. Large SEO suites (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Majestic) show this in their "best pages by links" or "broken pages" reports: filter on the 404 status and sort by number of referring domains. A dead guide with 30 linking domains gives you 30 prospects who all linked to the same subject. To see which competitors to study, a tool such as SEO Competitor Spy shows who is ranked and cited on your keywords.

3. Find resource pages in your niche

Resource pages (lists of useful links on a theme) are the classic target because they exist to link out. Find them with Google search operators, documented in Google's guide to search operators:

• [your topic] intitle:resources
• [your topic] inurl:links
• [your topic] "useful links" or "recommended reading"
• site:.edu [your topic] resources or site:.gov for public bodies

4. Check every prospect page for dead links

Run each page through a broken link checker to list the outbound links that return an error. Note the dead URL, its anchor text and the sentence around it: the anchor text tells you what the editor expected the reader to find. Discard pages that have not been updated in years or that are full of dead links: nobody maintains them.

5. Qualify the linking sites

Before writing anything, check that each linking site is worth the effort. Look at topical relevance first, then real traffic, then authority (a domain authority checker gives a quick view). Remove sites that sell links, link farms and pages unrelated to your audience. A short list of 20 relevant sites beats a list of 300 random ones.

6. See what the dead page used to say

Paste the dead URL into the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to read the last saved version. Write down what made people link to it: a statistic, a definition, a checklist, a calculator, a template. Your replacement must cover that exact point, otherwise the editor has no reason to switch.

7. Create or adapt the replacement page

If you already have a page on the subject, update it so it covers the points found in step 6. If you do not, create a page that answers the same need and improves on it: current data with sources, a clearer structure, a table or a template the original lacked. Keep the URL stable, since a replacement that breaks in turn would hurt your reputation with the editor.

8. Send a short email and follow up once

Find a named person (author, editor, webmaster) rather than a generic address. Send a message that names the page, the dead link and its position, then offers your page as one option among others. If there is no answer after five to seven working days, send a single follow-up in the same thread. Log every prospect, date and answer in a spreadsheet so you never contact the same person twice for the same link. Our guide to email outreach covers deliverability and personalization in more detail.

Which sources of broken links are worth your time?

Broken link building email templates

These three templates follow the structure that works best: a precise subject, the problem in the first line, the replacement offered without pressure, no attachment. Adapt every bracket; a template sent unchanged is spotted at once.

Template 1: resource page

Subject: Dead link on your [topic] resources page

Hi [first name],

I was going through your list of [topic] resources and noticed that the link to [name of the dead resource] (in the "[section]" part) now leads to an error page. [Other dead link] does too.

If you are looking for a replacement for the first one, our guide covers the same ground with updated figures: [URL]. Either way, thanks for keeping this list up to date, it is one of the most useful on the subject.

[Signature]

Template 2: article that cites a dead source

Subject: Quick fix for your article on [topic]

Hi [first name],

In your article "[title]", the sentence about [point] links to [dead URL], which now returns a 404. The original page gave [what it contained, from the Wayback Machine].

We published a page with the same [statistic / checklist / template], sourced and updated this year: [URL]. It could work as a replacement if you want to keep the reference.

[Signature]

Template 3: follow-up

Subject: Re: Dead link on your [topic] resources page

Hi [first name], a quick follow-up in case my message got buried: the link to [dead resource] on [page] still returns an error. Happy to send other options if mine does not fit.

[Signature]

What mistakes make broken link building fail?

• Offering money or a reciprocal link. Google's spam policies classify buying links that pass ranking credit and excessive reciprocal linking as link spam. A broken link pitch stays clean as long as the editor decides freely. Our page on buying backlinks details the risks.
• Pitching a weaker page. If your replacement covers less than the dead page did, the editor removes the link instead of swapping it.
• Mass mailing the same text. Generic emails land in spam folders and burn the domain you send from.
• Ignoring relevance. A link from an unrelated site brings little value to rankings and none to readers.
• Forgetting your own site. Dead outbound links on your pages send the same bad signal you point out to others: check them during every content update.

How does broken link building help with SEO and GEO?

For Google, each successful replacement is an editorial link from a page that already proved its topic is worth linking to, which is exactly the kind of signal that strengthens rankings. For AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, the effect is indirect but real: they build answers from pages they find and trust, and the resource pages, guides and Wikipedia references you target are among the sources they read. Our study of Wikipedia citations in AI answers shows how much weight these reference pages carry.

Broken link building remains manual work: a good campaign takes a few hours a week for several months. It fits into a wider plan with other backlink strategies and the free methods of our guide on how to get backlinks. To build a base of links without outreach, Sorank, our software, obtains natural backlinks automatically from the sites of its 5,000+ users, while it writes the articles that give those links something to point to, and shows which competitors the AIs cite in your place.

Broken link building works when you fix a real problem for the editor with a page that is better than the one they lost. Start with your own dead backlinks, then work through competitor 404 pages and resource lists in small, relevant batches. Plans start at $49 per month (billed annually) on the pricing page, with a 3-day free trial.