Broken Link Building Case Study

Broken link building has the cleanest pitch logic in outreach — "your page links to something dead; here's a live replacement" — and a reputation for being more work than it's worth. We ran a focused campaign to settle it with numbers: one niche (marketing/SEO adjacent), six weeks, one operator at roughly ten hours a week, following the standard playbook exactly. Here's the funnel, the numbers at each stage, and where the hours actually went.

The setup

Target: earn links to two existing reference assets (a definitive guide and a statistics page — you need live pages that can genuinely replace dead ones; we chose ours before prospecting, per the playbook's asset-first rule). Discovery ran three motions in parallel: dead pages found via competitors' lost-link reports (the richest source), resource-page sweeps in the niche run through a bulk link checker, and archived versions of known-defunct sites in the space to harvest what had linked to them.

The funnel, stage by stage

1. Dead targets identified: 14 pages worth replacing — each once-linked-to content our assets could genuinely stand in for. (This scarcity is the tactic's honest bottleneck: dead pages with real link equity and topical fit to your assets are rarer than tutorials imply.)
2. Linking pages harvested: 312 — every page still linking to those 14 corpses, pulled from the index and live-verified (about a third of the "linking" pages had already removed or updated the links — always verify before pitching).
3. After the screening funnel: 168 prospects — real sites with findable contacts, per the quality screen; directories, scrapers and abandoned blogs cut.
4. Pitched: 164 (four bounced past repair) — the standard two-sentence format: broken link location, replacement offered, no essay. Plus one follow-up at day five.
5. Replies: 41 (25%) — notably above cold-pitch norms, which is the tactic's structural advantage: you open with a favour.
6. Links placed: 19 (11.6% of pitched) — 14 swapped to our asset, 5 added it alongside other replacements. A further 9 thanked us and just deleted the dead link (the tactic's known leakage: you fixed their page for free), and 6 "will do" replies never materialised.

Where the hours went, and the per-link math

Roughly 60 hours total: discovery and verification ate half (the un-glamorous truth — finding good corpses is the job; pitching is the fast part), screening and contact-finding a quarter, writing and sending the rest. Net: ~3 hours per link earned, with the links landing on genuinely relevant, established pages — mid-tier niche sites mostly, two authority domains among them. Rankings on the two assets moved on the usual lag: nothing for five weeks, then steady climbs that continued past the campaign.

The patterns worth generalising

The tactic is discovery-constrained, not pitch-constrained — reply rates are the best in cold outreach, so campaign yield scales with corpse quality, and the competitor lost-link motion out-produced resource-page sweeps three to one. Batch it, don't drip it: the setup cost (assets chosen, screens configured) amortises over campaign bursts — as a quarterly two-week sprint it's excellent; as a standing weekly habit the discovery well runs dry in most niches. The leakage is the price: a third of your successful conversations improve the web without paying you — accept it going in; the favour-first framing that causes it is also why the replies come, per the whole series' process-beats-heroics pattern.

Frequently asked questions

Is an 11% link rate typical or did the niche flatter it?

Mid-range honest: content-adjacent niches with active site owners run 8–15% on well-screened lists; corporate and low-maintenance niches run lower because nobody's home to fix anything. The screen quality moves the number more than the niche does.

Could this scale with more hours or operators?

Sub-linearly — the 14 corpses were the niche's findable inventory that quarter; doubling pitch labour wouldn't have doubled targets. Scale comes from breadth (more niches, more assets) rather than depth, which is why agencies run it as one rotation in a tactic portfolio, not a standalone programme.

Is it worth doing at all versus just buying placements?

Different budgets: this is time-priced link earning at ~3 hours/link with zero cash — the legitimately-cheap tier's best conversion of effort into editorial links. If hours are your scarce currency instead, the arithmetic flips toward placements through existing publisher relationships (priced here) — most mature programmes run both.