[Method] Broken link building and finding dropped domains with good authority

I recently dumped a file with 2,600 404 links on Wikipedia and another one with 190 Dropped Domains.

Here's how you can find 404 links or drops relevant to your niche.

1. Get a list of authoritative websites from your niche and a list of relevant Wikipedia articles.

2. Download Netpeak Spider web crawler (2 weeks free, no limits, no CC required)

3. Set it to check the first website from your list and find only external outgoing links


Disable all other parameters to speed up crawling.

4. Once it's done crawling, export the list of external links and repeat for all website you have.

5. From your exported files remove all links that aren't AHREF type (IMG, IMG Ahref and etc)

6. Get all of the external links you scraped from all of your websites and put them into one spreadsheet. When you export the links you will have few columns such as link type and etc, but you only need to keep two columns where links are coming from and where they're pointing at:


7. Copy all links from the To URL column and paste them into Netpeak Spider. You'll have to switch it to crawl the list of URLs instead of an entire website.



8. Change Spider's settings to check only Status codes of these URLs

9. Once crawling is complete you can sort URLs by status code to get your 404 broken links.

10. Paste these 404 links into your main Sheet with To URL and From URL columns.

11. Use VLOOKUP to see which page links to 404 page.

12. Contact website owners and offer to replace a dead link with a link to your (relevant) page

How to find Dropped domains

Go back to Step 9

10. After you sort URLs by status code you'll see that some URLs don't have any status (not 4xx, not 5xx), it'll say Error.
This means that link from you list points to a non-existent website

11. Get these Zero Status links and check them through Godaddy's Bulk Checker



Alternatively, what I prefer doing.

Download Netpeak Checker (same company, same free trial)

And paste your Zero Status links into the checker. And set it to check the following parameters:

MOZ Domain Authority (You'll have to get a free API key from MOZ)
WHOIS availability

And you'll get similar results:



You'll see if domain is available (TRUE) and if it's any good (Domain Authority)

What to do next?

Once you found a drop, check it's backlink profile, with any Backlink tool


This is one of the drops I found while writing this post

If profile looks good buy the domain.

Restore site structure by checking which pages were linked most often.

Set up redirects to your own website.

?????

Profit.

Wonderful share.. Thanks and thanks given too

Nice share. Thanks !

Nargil is now out of orders

I'm doing this right now to find a decent domain to use as money site, thanks!

I just read a broken link building method from ahref blog, your method is so much better!

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just tried this method. Working perfectly. However its taking too much time as you have to enter sites 1 by 1. Is it possible to add complete list in one go?

seoz87 said:

just tried this method. Working perfectly. However its taking too much time as you have to enter sites 1 by 1. Is it possible to add complete list in one go?

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No, I don't think so. It either crawls an entire website, so one by one, or a list of urls, but to get the list of URLs you need to crawl the website

Wow nice, thanks!

great share bro! Thank you very much

virtualbyron said:

I just read a broken link building method from ahref blog, your method is so much better!

This thread is level JR VIP!

Click to expand...

I was reading an article by backlinko about this topic and have the same impression. It's like 'Hi, do you want to do it like a pro?'.

THANKS SKEYE! I will tell about it to our company SEO fella.

Great post! Will definitely be using this method

for the dropped domains I get no server status saying "Error" only for the dropped domains. I ran ALL the errors through the spider and there was plenty that were available but having to run all the errors makes the list turn HUGE...

spectrejoe said:

for the dropped domains I get no server status saying "Error" only for the dropped domains. I ran ALL the errors through the spider and there was plenty that were available but having to run all the errors makes the list turn HUGE...

Click to expand...

you're probably doing something different from what I did. Can you explain a bit more what problem you're facing? I used to have an intial list of external links too big, asked their support and they showed me how to use RegEx filter to remove domains that are 100% not drops, like wikimedia, youtube, bbc and etc. Narrowed down the list from 200k to 60K

Other than that I didn't have any problems.

skeye said:

you're probably doing something different from what I did. Can you explain a bit more what problem you're facing? I used to have an intial list of external links too big, asked their support and they showed me how to use RegEx filter to remove domains that are 100% not drops, like wikimedia, youtube, bbc and etc. Narrowed down the list from 200k to 60K

Other than that I didn't have any problems.

Click to expand...

I'm 100% doing the same thing you said in ur post, I crawl a whole site, export external links.

Filter out all NON AHREF links.

Get the links into scrapebox, trim to root, remove duplicates, place them again in the program, crawl again the list of URLs FOR STATUS CODES, export URLs + status codes.


Should have "Error" status codes but I don't have them despite having available domains

spectrejoe said:

I'm 100% doing the same thing you said in ur post, I crawl a whole site, export external links.

Filter out all NON AHREF links.

Get the links into scrapebox, trim to root, remove duplicates, place them again in the program, crawl again the list of URLs FOR STATUS CODES, export URLs + status codes.


Should have "Error" status codes but I don't have them despite having available domains

Click to expand...

That's weird. Did you try sorting by status before exporting to see if it works in the program? I think after I export it, the ones that have error status end up with empty cells in status codes.

Try running the list through Checker software and see if it displays status codes correctly.

I would contact their support about it, they helped me with RegEx and it was fast and painless.

Wow thanks man this is GOLD

This is a nice method shared! Though I cant read it because my PC cant use this tool, for a personal reason lol so I just cant follow.

I tried to deciper the whole process in a text version in my head but got a bit headache lol, the conclusion of your first part :

"Contact website owners and offer to replace a dead link with a link to your (relevant) page"

This is the final base point I understand, so could u write the theory behind this tool? Like A site got broken outbound links, so u simply use this tool to find those links?!

terrycody said:

This is a nice method shared! Though I cant read it because my PC cant use this tool, for a personal reason lol so I just cant follow.

I tried to deciper the whole process in a text version in my head but got a bit headache lol, the conclusion of your first part :

"Contact website owners and offer to replace a dead link with a link to your (relevant) page"

This is the final base point I understand, so could u write the theory behind this tool? Like A site got broken outbound links, so u simply use this tool to find those links?!

Click to expand...

Pretty much. You use it to crawl a website and see if there are any 404 external links. Then you check where that link is coming from and where is it supposed to lead.
For example, if it's from an article about bikes and links to another article where it says that Ducati 1199 has a top speed of 234kph. You simply create a post about ducati 1199 list its characteristics and email them saying that they've lost a source, here's the one you can link to.

Nice thread. Excellent method!