Broken Link Prospecting

The version that fails runs a crawler over a competitor domain, finds thousands of 404s, and mails everyone linking to them with a link to the homepage. The tactic only works under narrow conditions: the resource has to be genuinely dead rather than moved, your replacement has to do the same job rather than approximate it, and someone has to still be editing the linking page. Practitioners disagree about whether it is worth running at all now that reply rates have fallen, and the honest position is that it works at low volume with a real replacement and not otherwise.

The skill file

---
name: broken-link-prospecting
description: Use when you have or can build a resource that genuinely replaces something that went offline, and you need a reason for sites to say yes.
---

# Broken Link Prospecting

The version that fails runs a crawler over a competitor domain, finds thousands of 404s, and mails everyone linking to them with a link to the homepage. The tactic only works under narrow conditions: the resource has to be genuinely dead rather than moved, your replacement has to do the same job rather than approximate it, and someone has to still be editing the linking page. Practitioners disagree about whether it is worth running at all now that reply rates have fallen, and the honest position is that it works at low volume with a real replacement and not otherwise.

## What you need first

- a specific dead resource: a tool that shut down, a report nobody maintains, a site that went offline
- the Wayback Machine capture of that page so you know what it actually contained
- an existing page of yours that covers the same ground, or a decision and budget to build one
- a crawler that follows outbound links from candidate pages and records final status codes

## Method

1. Start from one well chosen dead resource rather than a bulk 404 crawl. Two hundred pages linking to a single defunct tool share one pitch; two hundred unrelated 404s need two hundred.
2. Read the Wayback capture before anything else and decide honestly whether you can replace it. The replacement is the entire pitch, so if it is weak nothing downstream rescues the campaign.
3. Confirm the resource is dead rather than moved. A 404 for a page that now lives at a new URL means the owner deserves an update to their own link, and pitching yours instead reads exactly as it is.
4. Pull the linking pages and recrawl them yourself to confirm the link is still on the page and the page still returns 200. A third party export two years old typically loses a large share at this step.
5. Filter to pages with signs of maintenance: a recent date, a working contact route, other links updated since. An abandoned resource page will not be edited whatever you send.
6. Build or finish the replacement before the first email goes out, and make it at least as complete as the original. Telling someone their link is broken and then landing them on a thin page costs you that contact permanently.
7. Write the email as a fix rather than a request: name the dead link and where it sits on the page, then offer your page as one option. Track placement rate per dead resource and drop any resource that will not clear a few percent.

## What this produces

A per-resource prospect list of live, maintained linking pages with a confirmed replacement page and outreach status against each.

## Where this goes wrong

- pitching a page that only partly covers what died, which reads as opportunism and gets refused
- skipping the recrawl and writing about links that were fixed or removed months ago, which ends the conversation on the first line
- working a dead resource whose linking pages are all directories and scrapers that no human will ever edit
- assuming a 404 means gone when the resource simply moved, so the correct answer was never your link

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/broken-link-prospecting

What you need first

• a specific dead resource: a tool that shut down, a report nobody maintains, a site that went offline
• the Wayback Machine capture of that page so you know what it actually contained
• an existing page of yours that covers the same ground, or a decision and budget to build one
• a crawler that follows outbound links from candidate pages and records final status codes

Method

1. 01 Start from one well chosen dead resource rather than a bulk 404 crawl. Two hundred pages linking to a single defunct tool share one pitch; two hundred unrelated 404s need two hundred.
2. 02 Read the Wayback capture before anything else and decide honestly whether you can replace it. The replacement is the entire pitch, so if it is weak nothing downstream rescues the campaign.
3. 03 Confirm the resource is dead rather than moved. A 404 for a page that now lives at a new URL means the owner deserves an update to their own link, and pitching yours instead reads exactly as it is.
4. 04 Pull the linking pages and recrawl them yourself to confirm the link is still on the page and the page still returns 200. A third party export two years old typically loses a large share at this step.
5. 05 Filter to pages with signs of maintenance: a recent date, a working contact route, other links updated since. An abandoned resource page will not be edited whatever you send.
6. 06 Build or finish the replacement before the first email goes out, and make it at least as complete as the original. Telling someone their link is broken and then landing them on a thin page costs you that contact permanently.
7. 07 Write the email as a fix rather than a request: name the dead link and where it sits on the page, then offer your page as one option. Track placement rate per dead resource and drop any resource that will not clear a few percent.

What this produces

A per-resource prospect list of live, maintained linking pages with a confirmed replacement page and outreach status against each.

Where this goes wrong

• pitching a page that only partly covers what died, which reads as opportunism and gets refused
• skipping the recrawl and writing about links that were fixed or removed months ago, which ends the conversation on the first line
• working a dead resource whose linking pages are all directories and scrapers that no human will ever edit
• assuming a 404 means gone when the resource simply moved, so the correct answer was never your link

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

Questions about this skill

More in Links & authority