Hello guys! This is Tim Soulo from Ahrefs,
and today I want to answer the question:
"how to get a backlink from a website."
You're watching episode number ten,
of the oversimplified SEO.
[Music]
In previous episodes, I showed you how to identify sites that help your
competitors rank well.
But now that you know the websites,
how do you make them link to you?
Don't stop watching.
Ok, let's say I want a backlink from Copyblogger.com,
which is a pretty famous blog about copywriting.
As you can see from Ahrefs' toolbar,
it has a Domain Rating of 70, which is a pretty solid number.
Since Copyblogger is actually a blog, the first thing
that comes to my mind is to write a guest post for them and have a
link to my website from this guest post.
But that's not very efficient because this way,
I'll have to write a solid piece of content
and I won't even keep it for myself because
it will be published on Copyblogger.
And I actually know a better way I can write a piece of content and have a link
from Copyblogger, while keeping the content to myself.
And as usual I'm going to need some help from Ahrefs tools.
So I'll open Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
and put the copyblogger.com domain name there.
Site Explorer tool allows me to find out
if Copyblogger.com's website is linking to some content that no longer exists.
And as you know from my previous episode,
I can check it with the broken links report of Site Explorer.
As you can see, there are 2,210 broken links on copyblogger's website.
But I'm interested in dofollow links
because these probably link to some quality pieces of content that no longer exist.
So this is their list of do follow broken links.
And actually as you can see, the very first broken link looks interesting.
It seems to be an article with 'top 10 blogs for writers.'
Let's open it and see if it actually exists or not.
Nope! This article returns a 404 not found error.
By looking at the URL of this article, I can tell that this was a list of the top 10 blogs for writers.
And there's actually a way to restore this article and check what was there when it was live.
We can use the amazing service called archive.org
and check for previous snapshots of this page.
For example, a snapshot from 2010.
Let's see if the article was live at the time.
Yes, this is the original piece of content that the guys from Copyblogger were linking to.
So what I could do is write a "top 10 blogs for writers"article on my own blog
and then reach out to Copy Blogger and tell them that they have a broken link and they can
change it to a live link with pretty much the same article,
but maybe even a better one on my own website.
This technique is known as broken link building and it's pretty popular among SEOs.
And what I personally like about it is
that you're keeping a piece of content to yourself, while getting a
backlink from a powerful website.
But here's another great thing that I love about broken link building.
I'm sure that Copyblogger's website is not the only one
who is linking to this dead article.
So what I'm going to do, is check for other sites that might link to this page.
I'll take the URL of this page, open another instance of Site Explorer,
and search for backlinks to this URL.
As you can see, there are 27 sites that link to this piece of content that is no longer there.
And to see them, I just go to the 'referring domains' report of Site Explorer.
So once I recreate this piece of content on my own blog,
I can reach out to all 27 sites and let them know that they have a broken link,
and that they can update it with a link to a similar resource on my own site.
To be honest, I don't believe that I will be able to make all 27 sites update
their dead link with the link to my article, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able
to make at least five of them link to me;
which is a pretty good result from a single piece of content.
And then I would go back to the broken links of Copyblogger,
find another cool piece of content that no longer exists, but has many other
websites still linking to it, and again, I would recreate it on my blog
and reach out to all the guys and have them link to me.
As you can see there are 740 potential opportunities
for broken link building on Copyblogger alone.
And I'm sure even in your niche, there are tons of sites that have broken links,
which is a great opportunity for you to create awesome content on your site
and have them update their broken links and link to you.
[Music]
That's it! I hope you enjoyed this little broken link building trick and I
encourage you to go and try it on your own site right now.
And if you have any questions about SEO
that you want me to answer in one of the next episodes of
oversimplified SEO, please send them to my mailbox at:
See you in the next episode!