One broken-link campaign, 1,100 prospects, 47 links, and a topic taken

One broken-link campaign, 1,100 prospects, 47 links, and a topic taken

Word is a hosting-comparison site that ran a single surgical broken-link play. We watched the new domains land in real time.

The operation by the numbers:
— scraped a dead 'web hosting resources' page that had ~1,100 sites linking to it
— built one superior replacement guide
— pitched all 1,100; 47 swapped their dead link for the new one in 8 weeks

Why it worked, visible in the footprint: those 47 donors were already topically aligned — every one had previously chosen to link to a hosting resource. No relevance guesswork.

The outcome: the replacement guide hit position 2 for its head term and pulled the rest of the resources section up with it via internal links.

The read: dead pages with big link counts are pre-qualified prospect lists. The relevance is already proven by the links that exist. Watch this space.