Web Marketing Strategy Update

If you understand how important backlinks are for SEO, then I know you’ll love the idea of getting free backlinks with high PR. In this post you’re going to learn how you can take advantage of the broken links on other websites, in order to build your own. It’s an excellent strategy for getting some powerful high PageRank backlinks in the range of PR3 to PR6.

404 Error Pages Explained

Before we go on, what exactly is a 404 page? It’s an error page that’s displayed by a website when the actual page you requested (usually by clicking on a link) cannot be found. 404 is the designated HTTP status code web servers respond with in such a situation. Documents on a website are stored in much the same way as the files on your computer, so say for example you keep your resume, “resume.pdf” in a folder called “work” within your “documents” folder.

On a website that location would be represented by an URL like this: www.domain.com/documents/work/resume.pdf. If you or someone else used this URL to create a link to the document, and then you later deleted or re-named your resume, or moved it to another folder, a 404 error results when the link is followed.

Finding Free High PR Backlinks

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t explain how you can use a 404 create backlinks. I’m getting to that now. You see, webmasters link to other sites when they think their readers will gain some value from visiting them, but when these links break nobody wins. At this point you can swoop in with a well-timed email to the site owner saying something along the lines of “hey, this link on your site is broken, don’t worry though, I’ve reconstructed it here: http://yoursite.com/somepage.html”.

You’re probably wondering how to find these linking opportunities efficiently. The first thing you need is a search query string that will bring up webpages which are both relevant to your own site and are likely to have broken links in them, like this:

In this case “dog training” brings up pages about (no surprises here) dog training; the operator “inurl” filters the results to only show webpages that have the word “links” in the URL, i.e. a websites links pages. You can try other words like “blogroll”, “resources” etc., as well.

For the purpose of this demonstration I simply took the first result, which is the PR 2 website shown below. But to target only high PR sites, use a a tool like the SEO for Firefox plugin, which displays PR and other metrics for each site in the search results.

Now you need to find out if any of the links are broken. Unless you want to waste your time clicking every single link on the page to see if any 404 errors are returned, you need a 404 checker. There are several out there, I used Google and http://404checker.com/link-checker was the first one which came up. Once you have found one you like run the url to see if there are an 404′s.

As you can see all the links on this page are good, don’t be too surprised to find a few of these with your efforts, persevere and eventually you will find a 404 error.

Make Contact And Get Your Free Link

When you do find a 404 you need to get in touch with the site owner, again this is usually easy. Simply go to the site and locate the contact page.

Occasionally you will find sites which don’t have contact pages, but don’t worry there is a way around this too. Google “whois” and visit any of the sites that come up. Enter the domain you want to check to bring up the contact information of the person who registered the domain i.e. the webmaster.

Then simply send an email to the person saying something like:

“Hi,

I was browsing your site and couldn’t help noticing that the link: (404 error link) was broken on this page: (links page). If you would like to fix the link, the same information can be found here:(your page).

Best Regards,

Your Name”

Short and simple and the job is done.

This can be an easy way to get some free high PR backlinks while providing value to both a site and their users. Of course, if you don’t already have relevant content to offer in place of the broken link, it can often be worth creating it. I should also mention that pages with fewer links are always better than those with many links, because the PR passed via each link is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the page.

This post was written by Rob from plrpanda.net, who is currently working on his bigcontentsearch review.