Broken Link Building for SaaS: How to Do It Right

Broken link building means finding a dead link on someone else's page, then suggesting your own relevant page as a replacement. It works because you begin by helping: the site owner has a broken page and may not know. For SaaS companies, it works best when the dead link pointed to a resource you can honestly replace, which often means a defunct competitor, a retired tool or an old guide.

It's a slower tactic than it sounds. Many broken links aren't worth pursuing, and many site owners never respond. A small targeted effort usually beats scanning thousands of pages.

Why SaaS has an unusual opportunity

Software companies shut down, get acquired and rename their products constantly. Each time that happens, roundups, how-to guides and comparison posts around the web are left linking to a dead domain or a redirect to somewhere unrelated.

Say you run a 25-person SaaS for managing customer feedback, and a former competitor closed last year. Every article that recommended it now contains a dead link and an out-of-date recommendation. The author has a reason to fix it, and you have a natural replacement. Also consider:

• Acquired tools whose pages were folded into a parent product
• Discontinued free tools, such as calculators and graders
• Dead statistics and research reports that many articles cited
• Old documentation for APIs and integrations
• Retired templates and downloadable resources

These are more promising than a random 404, since each comes with a clear reason why your page belongs there.

How to find broken links worth pursuing

Three methods cover most of it.

Dead competitors. List the tools in your category that closed or were absorbed. Put each old domain into a backlink tool to see who still links to it. That one list may be enough for a whole campaign, since each page on it was already interested in your exact topic.

Competitors' lost pages. Many backlink tools can show pages on a site that return a 404 and still have links pointing at them, and these are often called "best by links" reports. Check competitors' sites for retired resources.

Pages in your niche. Find resource pages and roundups on your topic, using searches such as "customer feedback" "resources" or intitle:"best customer feedback tools". Then check their outbound links with a browser extension or a site crawler. It's more manual, but it finds things that tools can miss.

Always check the link yourself before contacting anyone. Tools report false positives, particularly on sites that block crawlers, and telling someone their link is broken when it isn't is embarrassing. Also check the Wayback Machine to see what the dead page actually said, so that you can judge whether yours is a fair replacement.

Decide if your page is a real replacement

This is where most broken link campaigns go wrong. If the dead page was a free NPS calculator, and you offer a blog post that mentions NPS, you're not offering a replacement. You're asking for a favor with an excuse attached.

Ask three questions:

1. Does my page do the same job? A reader clicking the link expected something specific. Would they find it?
2. Would I be comfortable if the editor looked closely? They might. Your page should read as useful, not as a sales pitch. A pricing page rarely works as a replacement, but a guide or a tool might.
3. Is it worth building? If many sites link to a dead resource and nothing replaces it, creating a better version could be worthwhile. Check the number of linking pages first, and don't build for just one or two.

Going back to the feedback SaaS, if a closed competitor's free survey template library has dozens of links pointing at it, building a truly useful template library may be a better investment than any other link project this quarter. Our post on templates and checklists as content marketing discusses how to make those work. Note that the plan is to make a real resource and not to copy the old one, which belongs to someone else.

Also think about the alternatives. If a competitor's domain has expired and has plenty of links, you might be tempted to buy it and redirect it. Google's spam policies cover expired domain abuse, so be careful: buying an old domain to pass along its reputation to unrelated content is exactly what the policy targets. Stick to outreach.

How to write the email

Keep it short, and lead with the broken link. The reader is doing you a favor by reading it, so make it quick to check and fix.

Subject: Dead link in your feedback tools roundup

Hi Dana,

Your roundup of customer feedback tools links to FeedbackCo, which
closed down, so the link now leads to a parked domain. It's under
the "survey tools" section.

If you're looking for a replacement, we built a free survey template
library that covers the same ground: [URL]. No problem if it isn't
a fit, and either way I thought you'd want to know about the link.

Sam

Be open about the fact that the page is yours. Hiding it is dishonest, and they'll find out anyway. Naming the exact location of the problem saves them time, and it's what makes this feel like help. Telling them "no problem if not" makes it more likely they'll reply.

You can also share any other broken links you noticed, with no strings attached. It's a small gesture, but it shows that you actually read the page. See link building outreach that gets replies for the rest of the approach.

One follow-up is fine. After that, stop. Avoid offering payment or a reciprocal link, as both may cross the lines in Google's link spam policy.

What to expect

Be realistic. Many sites won't reply, since old articles often have no one actively maintaining them, and some will fix the link by simply removing it or pointing it elsewhere. That's fine. Don't judge the tactic by a single small batch, and don't scale up before you've got replies to a small one.

Judge the pages by more than a metric. Does this page have traffic? Is it on a site that still publishes? A link on an abandoned resource page may do little, and the editor probably won't reply anyway. Focus your effort on maintained sites that your buyers actually read.

Fix your own broken links too

While you're doing this, look at your own house. Run a crawl for broken outbound links on your site, then fix them. A blog with a long history tends to pick these up, and your own readers are affected. You should also find your own pages that return a 404 and still have links pointing at them, then 301 redirect them to the closest equivalent. Links you've already earned are easier to keep than new ones are to win.

For a wider view of your link profile, read our backlink audit guide. And to see how this fits with other tactics, read off-page SEO for SaaS.

If you'd rather put your time into the product and hand this off, see what SEO Growth includes.