![\"broken](\"https:\/\/3way.social\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/broken-link-building.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhy there are so many dead links to chase<\/h3>\n
The tactic rests on one dull fact about the web: links rot. Pages get deleted. Sites migrate and forget half their redirects. Companies fold and their domains lapse. It happens constantly, to everyone.<\/p>\n
Linkody tracked more than 865,000 backlinks through 2026 and found only about 56% were still live and pointing where they were meant to, with roughly 63% surviving a year after they first went up (Linkody, 2026<\/a>). Read that the other way round. A large slice of the links out there already point at nothing.<\/p>\n That\u2019s your raw material. Every dead page that still has links is a little list of editors who once looked at a resource and decided it was worth a mention. The resource is gone. The willingness to link is still sitting there on the page.<\/p>\n And if you think links have stopped counting, look at what Google did this month. On 15 October, Google\u2019s VP of product Hema Budaraju said the company is \u201claunching updates to show inline links higher up<\/a> in responses more frequently\u201d, and that use of its Preferred Sources feature has grown more than 7x since the start of the year (PPC Land, 15 Oct 2026). Google\u2019s giving links more prominence in AI answers this month. Whoever owns the link to the live, correct page wins that spot.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s where it usually goes wrong. People find a dead link, get excited, and fire off a pitch for something with two referring domains from blogs nobody\u2019s touched since 2021. That’s a waste of a morning.<\/p>\n Be picky. You want dead pages with lots of live, relevant links<\/a>.<\/p>\n Open Semrush, drop in a competitor\u2019s domain, go to the Backlinks report and then Indexed Pages. Filter for broken pages. Sort by the number of referring domains. Now you can see which of their dead URLs editors loved most. Export the list of sites linking to each one. Those are your targets.<\/p>\n Resource pages are built out of links, so they break often. Find them with search operators like The honest limit here comes from Respona, who put it plainly: \u201cBroken link building still works, but it\u2019s not the most scalable link building strategy\u201d (Respona<\/a>). They\u2019re right. This is a scalpel. You won\u2019t land 200 links a month with it. You\u2019ll land a handful of good ones from sites that actually cover your topic, and in 2026 that\u2019s the trade I\u2019ll take every time.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t offer a swap that\u2019s worse than the thing that died. Nobody\u2019s going to take a thin 400-word post in place of a beloved guide that got deleted.<\/p>\n This matters more than it used to. Google\u2019s September 2026 spam update<\/a> finished rolling out on 8 October after nearly 14 days (Search Engine Land<\/a>). Barry Schwartz reported Google describing it as \u201cnormal spam\u201d, nothing dramatic. But the direction of travel is clear enough: relevance-matched, earned links are the safe lane, and bulk bought links keep getting riskier. Broken link building sits right inside that safe lane, because you\u2019re matching a real page to a real gap on someone\u2019s site.<\/p>\n So before you pitch, make sure your replacement actually covers the dead page\u2019s topic, properly, and ideally better than the original did. If you don\u2019t have anything suitable, write it first. Or move on to a different dead link. Don\u2019t bend a mismatched page into the pitch and hope.<\/p>\n The site owner has a broken link on their page. That\u2019s a small bug on their site, and you found it for them. Open with that. You\u2019re doing them a favour before you ask for anything.<\/p>\n One email. Name the exact page, name the exact dead link, offer one replacement. Done. The longer and more flattering the email, the more it reads like a template, and everyone can smell a template now.<\/p>\nHow to find broken links worth your time<\/h3>\n
Mine your competitors\u2019 dead pages<\/h4>\n
Hit resource pages and listicles<\/h4>\n
keyword inurl:resources<\/code> or keyword intitle:links<\/code>. Then run a free checker like the Check My Links extension, which paints dead links red right there on the page. When you spot a cluster of broken ones, run that page\u2019s backlink profile too.<\/p>\nYour replacement page has to earn the link<\/h3>\n
Writing outreach that actually gets a reply<\/h3>\n
Lead with their problem, not yours<\/h4>\n
Keep it short and specific<\/h4>\n