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BY COPPER SUN
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10 min readBrass-SEO Team

Broken Link Building: The Tactic Small Sites Skip

Link BuildingContent Optimization

A broken link pitch opens with you doing the site owner a favor. Most link outreach opens with you asking for one. That single difference is why broken link building converts better than a generic "please link to my post" email, and why so few small business sites actually run it.

The process is three steps: find a dead link on a relevant page, check what used to live at that URL, and offer a genuine replacement. Nothing about that requires an agency budget or outreach software. It requires a free browser extension, a free archive tool, and content good enough to be worth the swap.

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Broken link building has a reputation for being more setup work than firing off a cold outreach template, but the actual mechanics fit in three steps: find the dead link, check what it used to point to, offer something that fills the gap. The reputation is wrong. What scares people off is scale, not difficulty.

Most link building advice that gets written for agencies talks about volume: hundreds of prospects, dozens of emails a week, a spreadsheet tracking response rates. Run at agency scale, broken link building is a grind. Run at small-business scale, it is a short weekly task. You are not trying to find two hundred broken links. You need five to ten on pages genuinely relevant to your business, and one solid email for each.

The other reason it gets skipped: a normal cold pitch feels awkward because you're asking a stranger to do you a favor for no clear reason. Broken link outreach flips that. You show up with information the site owner did not have. The ask, if there is one at all, comes second.

The Check My Links Chrome extension crawls every link on the page you're currently viewing and highlights which ones are broken, redirected, or working, so you don't have to click through each link by hand. As of mid-2026 it's free, has roughly 90,000 users on the Chrome Web Store, and has been updated recently, which matters because plenty of similar-sounding extensions get abandoned and stop working.

To use it: install the extension, open a page you want to check, and click the toolbar icon. It scans the page and color-codes every outbound link. Broken links show up immediately instead of requiring you to click each one and wait for a 404.

The harder part is not the tool. It's finding the right pages to run it on. Broken links accumulate fastest on pages that link out heavily and rarely get revisited:

  • Resource pages — curated lists of tools, reading, or vendors in your industry. These pages get built once and forgotten, so old links rot for years. Our guide to resource page link building covers how to find these pages in the first place, and the same list works here.
  • "Recommended tools" or "further reading" sections on blog posts, especially older ones with a visible publish date.
  • Industry directories and roundup posts — "best X for Y" articles that cite external sources.
  • .edu and .gov resource lists, which tend to sit untouched for years once published.

Search operators help you find candidates fast: site:example.com "resources" or "recommended tools" [your industry] surfaces pages built to link out. Prioritize older content. A page dated three or four years back has had more time to accumulate dead links than something published last month.

Use the Wayback Machine to See What You Are Replacing

The Wayback Machine at web.archive.org keeps free, dated snapshots of most public web pages, which lets you see exactly what content used to sit at a dead URL before you pitch anything to replace it. It costs nothing, needs no account, and covers most of the web back to the late 1990s.

To use it: paste the broken URL into web.archive.org, then browse the calendar for a snapshot from before the page went dead. Pick a date reasonably close to when the link was likely added to the page linking out to it, since content sometimes changes across a page's lifetime. If one snapshot looks incomplete or fails to load properly, try a different date. Most active pages have multiple captures.

This step is what separates a real broken-link pitch from a generic one. A generic pitch says "I have content about X, would you link to it?" A targeted pitch says "the page you're linking to used to cover Y in this specific way, and my page covers that plus Z." The site owner is not evaluating whether your content is good in the abstract. They're evaluating whether it does the job the dead link used to do.

Before you pitch a broken-link replacement, read your own draft as the person who clicked that original link would have read it. If it doesn't fully answer what they came for, the site owner has no real reason to make the swap, no matter how polite your email is.

Use the archived version as your checklist, not just your inspiration. If the original was a step-by-step guide, a two-paragraph blog mention isn't a real substitute. If the dead page had a downloadable checklist or a specific data point, either match that format or explain clearly why your version covers the same ground differently. Update anything the old page got wrong or let go stale. A replacement that fixes outdated information is a stronger pitch than one that just exists.

This is also where the tactic can go wrong for small sites in a hurry. Pitching a page that is tangentially related, rather than a genuine substitute, is the single fastest way to get ignored. Site owners who maintain resource pages get pitched constantly. The ones who reply are the ones where the fit is obvious in ten seconds.

The Outreach Email That Makes This Tactic Different

Broken link outreach opens with information the site owner didn't have, which makes the message read as a report rather than a request. That reframing is the entire reason this tactic outperforms a standard cold pitch, and it should shape how you write the email.

Lead with the problem, not the ask. Name the exact page and the exact broken URL in the first line, so the reader knows immediately this isn't a form email:

Subject: Broken link on your [Page Title] page

Hi [Name],

I was reading your [Page Title] page and noticed the link to [old URL] under "[section name]" is dead — it returns a 404.

If it's useful, I put together [your page title], which covers similar ground: [one specific sentence on what it covers]. No worries either way, just wanted to flag the dead link.

[Your name]

Notice what that email does not do. It doesn't open with a request, and it doesn't claim your content is the best resource on the internet. There's no pitch-deck's worth of reasons you deserve the link — just a fact the reader can verify in ten seconds, followed by something low-pressure offered as a second thought.

Keep it short. A broken-link email that runs longer than four or five sentences starts to feel like a sales pitch wearing a favor as a disguise, which undercuts the exact thing that makes this tactic work.

A Repeatable Workflow

The entire process fits into a short weekly list rather than an ongoing campaign, which is what keeps it sustainable for a one-person marketing effort. Once the pieces are in place, the weekly version looks like this:

  1. Find candidate pages — resource pages, roundup posts, and older articles in your niche.
  2. Run Check My Links on each one and note every broken URL, its anchor text, and the page it's on.
  3. Check the Wayback Machine for each broken URL to see what content used to be there.
  4. Decide fit — does an existing page on your site already cover that ground, or do you need to write something new?
  5. Send one short, specific email per opportunity. No mail-merge templates.
  6. Follow up once, politely, after a week or two. If there's no response after that, move on.

This works because it's a small, targeted list, not a numbers game. Five well-matched broken-link pitches a week will outperform fifty generic ones. For the broader system this tactic fits into, alongside other link opportunities worth prioritizing before you write a single outreach email, see our guide to link building for small business.

Before you pitch a replacement, it helps to know which of your own pages are actually strong enough to be worth pitching. The Brass-SEO Valuable Pages button surfaces the pages on your site with the strongest engagement and organic growth signals, drawn from your connected Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 data. That's a useful starting shortlist before you go looking for broken links to attach them to. Brass-SEO costs $25/month with a 3-day free trial. Visit your dashboard to connect your accounts and see which pages make the list.

Frequently Asked Questions

The underlying mechanic hasn't changed: sites still publish outbound links, pages still get taken down or moved, and outbound links still go dead over time. What matters for effectiveness is targeting. A handful of broken links on genuinely relevant, actively maintained pages will outperform a large volume of loosely related ones, regardless of the year.

No. The Check My Links Chrome extension is free and checks every link on the page you're currently viewing. You don't need an enterprise crawler or a paid backlink database to run this tactic at small-business scale, since you're checking a handful of specific pages rather than crawling an entire site.

What if the Wayback Machine doesn't have a snapshot of the dead page?

Try a few different dates on the calendar view, since not every page gets captured on every visit. If no snapshot exists at all, you can still pitch a replacement, but lead with what the current page's topic and audience suggest the reader was looking for, rather than claiming to know exactly what the old page said.

A standard cold pitch asks the site owner to do you a favor with no clear reason beyond your own benefit. A broken-link email opens by reporting something wrong with their page that they likely don't know about. The replacement offer comes second, framed as optional. That order matters more than the wording.

Should I mention the replacement content, or just report the broken link?

Mention it, but keep it secondary and low-pressure. Reporting the broken link with no follow-up is generous but rarely results in a new link. Reporting it and immediately demanding a swap turns the favor into a transaction. The middle ground — flag the problem, then offer your page as one option if it's useful — gets the best response because it respects that the decision is entirely theirs.

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