Been doing a variation of broken link building for a personal finance site and wanted to share numbers and get feedback on the process.
Process:
1. Find competitor or industry pages that now return 404 but still have 20+ referring domains
2. Check the archived version to see what the page actually was
3. Build a better, updated version on our site
4. Email the linking sites saying the old page is gone and ours covers the same thing
So far I’ve rebuilt 6 pages. Best one was an old calculator guide from a defunct bank blog with 64 linking domains. Emailed 58 of them, got 11 links. Worst one was a glossary page: 30 emails, 1 link.
What I learned: the ones linked from resource-style pages convert, ones linked from within news articles basically never do, since nobody edits old news.
Anyone else doing it this way? How do you prioritise which dead pages to rebuild, just by referring domains or something smarter like how many of those linking pages still get traffic?
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