Link building

Found a company doing a novel new trick, well new to me anyway.

They scanned my authority website for dead links
Then put up some content relative to my dead outbound links on their own site
Then email and ask if they can quote my site with link back to me (naturally I agree)
When I confirm it’s ok they tell me about the dead link saying they know how hard it is to run large important sites and monitor everything and offer their (new) page as an alternative link.

I can see that working for them.

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. I originally heard about this as just alerting webmasters of their broken links and then suggesting your own site as an alternative.

    I love the twist of asking if it’s “ok to link to you” as the foot in the door and letting the law of reciprocity work its magic.

    Very smart, but also very time consuming.

    So did it work on you? 🙂

  2. Hah, that’s a clever idea. Did you accept their offer and put the content on your site?

  3. I didn’t actually give them the link but thanked them for the heads up, lots of dead links to sort so I will be going through them.

  4. this does not work. most webmaster’s won’t even reply.

    • Have you tried it?

      I haven’t yet, but I think you could speed up the process by adding the relevant content to your site after they respond initially to you asking if you can link to them.

      This way if they don’t respond you haven’t really wasted any time, since the content part can be the most time consuming.

  5. Thats absolutely brillant.
    You get them to open the page for editing..
    then “while you are up, can you get me a glass of water?”

  6. ok reloading the page didn’t fix it.. but submitting the second comment did… >.<

    Now how do i delete comment #2 and #3 ?

  7. I have a question on these aged domains which you are buying, are they all on the same hosting server? Or are you spreading them around?
    Steve Bartoli

  8. I can see it working but it sure seems like alot of work and randomness involved in the whole process to acquire the links. I mean from what I would gather… it would be pretty hard to scour the net to look for broken links.

    Till then,

    Jean

  9. Its a good idea in theory, but surely the amount of work (adding articles that match a dead link) its worth it.

    Simplify it further and I think its a good shout just to contact webmasters who have dead links pointing to competitiors or related sites.

  10. this is a really cool trick but like “Bill” said, it is very time consuming. Just another option to try.

  11. Wow Scott, some people got stones! Then, they approached you about the whole thing??? It’s so much easier to just do things the right way…but glad you got a heads up on those broken links, good for you. Thanks for sharing so we can keep our eyes open for this kind of shenanigans…

  12. Now that’s a clever way to get backlinks. 🙂 But surely it does require a lot of work to implement it in order to scrape for those broken links.

    Steve

  13. That’s a very interesting way to get links from possibly high PR sites. However, you will need some software tools to find and scan hundreds of authority sites. The only drawback of this strategy is that they are only generating reciprocal backlinks (if I understood correctly?) - which are not as valuable anymore.

  14. what a shitty way to screw honest webmasters
    shame on folks who did this to you!

  15. Scott, Like you I am just beginning to see some really underhanded things in the internet world. This pretty new to me, eye opening.

  16. Come to think of it I think i’ve seen this suggested in a list of recommended methods for building links.

    It involves extra work but hopefully the “karma” you earn from that effort will work in your favor.

  17. Where link building has been very important in the past, but what is more important now with Panda update we have to make sure the content provide is unique.

  18. That’s a qaulity idea. So they get a decent related link and you get free content. Benifts both of you.

  19. It does seem like decent link building strategy, they kind of doing you a favor – identifying your dead links and providing you with alternative content, but it does seem like a lot of work with no guaranteed ROI because you may find it irrelevant or not valuable enough to throw a link, at the same time there is a plugin I think “broken link checker” that will check and monitor all links on your website.

  20. I guess that will work. Its a dead link for you so you should have no adverse effects from this.
    I just find it kind of questionable the path that was take to get there.

  21. Man been like 7 months since your last post.. =/
    Been busy I take it?

  22. can you please share the company’s name?
    i am interested in gknowing my site’s broken backlinks as well

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