Is broken link building the next SEO gold rush?
For this weeks post I wanted to talk about broken link building. Hopefully quite a bit of you are already familiar with this as it has been discussed a few times by some SEO major hitters, like Moz and Majestic. So a lot of people have been talking about the ethics and best practices of broken link building and that’s great, but you don’t need me to harp on it.
In fact if you’re inclined I would recommend visiting the Moz blog to read at least a few of the articles they have on broken link building. What I think is more important about broken link building is that there are still quite a few SEOs who haven’t begun to take advantage of this strategy when they really should be. The reason that SEOs aren’t using this strategy is because they don’t believe that the payout is significant enough for their time/monetary investment.
The issue is that broken link building doesn’t really take that much time, when you’re using the right strategies and tools. There are now many effective, quality tools that have been developed as a result of the growing popularity of broken link building. Their primary development has been reducing the amount of time it takes to locate broken links, where now it only takes a few minutes for a prospector to locate the broken links they’re looking for. The rest of the effort comes from convincing the owner of those broken links to direct their links to your SERP, or target site. It doesn’t take that much to persuade people to trade out their broken links though.Bottom line, nobody wants broken links on their site. They made those links for a reason, specifically to serve their audience.
Plus Google’s spam team has stated that they flag sites with broken links as potential web spam. If you provide them with a good alternative then you’re helping them improve their site in addition to boosting the juice for your SERP. So as long as your SERP has quality content and you approach the owner of the broken link with the right demeanor and pitch, you’ll find broken link building a relatively easy strategy. The payout can be pretty significant as you would be investing in links that not only have good juice, but also have significant returns since you are acquiring links that have potential for long term delivery.
Visitors who are lead through broken link building have longer visit durations and are more likely to stay on your SERP, which according to some of what we’ve seen with the way Google has been analyzing data lately also improves your ranking with them. A great thing about this strategy is that it doesn’t run the risk of being flagged by Google as web spam.
By minimizing your risk for being flagged by Google combined with other Phoenix SEO services and strategies, like if you buy high PR domains, you’ll be maximizing your payoff. In response to some of the changes Google has been making to aggressively tackle web spam there is a good chance that we are on the verge of a gold rush for broken link building. The good news is that broken links are replenishing resource as the web continues to grow and change, but if SEOs don’t start taking broken link building seriously then they run the risk of getting smaller payouts when they are finally forced to get on the bandwagon.
My recommendation get on board now while the resource is rich and abundant.