Broken Link Building Opportunities on Wikipedia
Broken link building has it all…
Scalable.
White hat.
Powerful.
There’s only one problem: finding broken links is a HUGE pain. That is, unless you know about a little-known wrinkle in Wikipedia’s editing system. You see, when a Wikipedia editor stumbles on a dead link, they don’t delete the link right away. Instead, they add a footnote next to the link that says “dead link”:
This footnote gives other editors a chance to confirm that the link is actually dead before removing it. And that simple footnote makes finding broken links in almost any niche dead simple.
Here’s how:
First, use this simple search string:
site:wikipedia.org [keyword] + “dead link”
For example, if you were in the SEO space you’d search for something like this:
Next, visit a page in the search results that’s relevant to your site:
Hit ctrl + f and search for “dead link”:
Your browser will jump to any dead links in the references section:
Backlinko reader Danny pointed out that Wikipedia actually has a list of articles with dead links. This makes finding dead links in Wikipedia even easier.
You can also use a new tool called WikiGrabber that allows you to search for dead links on Wikipedia pages.
Once you’ve found a dead link, now what?
Well you could re-create that dead resource on your site and replace the dead link in Wikipedia with yours.
But that would only land you a single link (and a nofollow link at that).
Here’s how to get the most out of the dead links that you find:
As you may expect, a resource that get linked to from Wikipedia usually has A LOT of links from other authoritative sites.
That’s why you want to take your broken link and pop it into ahrefs (or your link analysis tool of choice):
And you’ll get a long list of sites that you can contact about their broken link:
Reference: http://backlinko.com/seo-techniques
And it took me about 30 seconds to find.
Easy, right?
