Broken link building and resource page links: process, cost and realistic results

Broken link building finds pages that link to something that no longer exists and offers your page as the replacement. Resource page link building is its close relative: you ask the curator of a “useful links” page to add yours. In both cases you are helping someone maintain a page they already care about, which is why the links are R1.

Unless a source is named, the process and cost figures on this page are practitioner knowledge. Published success rates for these tactics are inconsistent, and we say so where it matters.

Why people use them

The pitch gives the site owner something: a fix for a dead link, or a resource their readers will use. No money changes hands, and nothing in it conflicts with Google’s spam policies. The links also tend to sit on pages that have been online for years and collected links of their own.

The limit is supply. There are only so many dead resources and maintained link pages in any field.

What it costs

• Broken link building: about $100 to $300 per earned link, covering the replacement content and the outreach.
• Resource page links: about $50 to $200 per link in labour, if the asset already exists.

Both are practitioner estimates. Expect two to six weeks from the first emails to the first live link.

Broken link building, step by step

1. Find dead pages that still have links. Run a backlink tool’s broken backlinks report on competitor sites, or filter their most-linked pages to those returning a 404. Wikipedia’s dead link notices on articles in your field are another source.
2. See what the page used to be. Open it in the Wayback Machine.
3. Build the replacement. Recreate the resource or improve on it. It has to be an honest substitute for what the link originally pointed to.
4. Export the pages that link to the dead URL.
5. Email the right person. Give the exact location of the dead link and your replacement. Keep it short.

Practitioners suggest only pursuing a dead resource that had 20 or more referring domains. Below that, the content cost is hard to recover.

Resource page link building, step by step

1. Search. Use operators such as intitle:resources, inurl:links or “helpful resources” with your topic.
2. Qualify the page. Practitioner rules of thumb: it has been updated in the last two years, it lists fewer than 100 links, and it is on your topic.
3. Pitch a non-commercial resource. A guide, a tool, a dataset. Curators do not add product pages.

The best hosts are universities, libraries, public bodies and associations. If you do not have an asset that fits, build one first: see linkable assets.

What results to expect

Guides quote a conversion rate of 2 to 10 percent of prospects for broken link building. That is low-confidence evidence. Our research found success figures for classic outreach tactics ranging widely for the same method, with no large current dataset behind them.

Broader outreach benchmarks give a sense of scale. BuzzStream measured a 3.59 percent reply rate across 51 million outreach emails in 2025, and Hunter’s outreach guide puts prospect-to-link conversion for standard link outreach at about 1.3 percent. A broken link email offers a concrete fix, which is why practitioners expect it to beat a generic request. Plan on the low end until your own numbers say otherwise.

One follow-up helps. The Backlinko and Pitchbox study of 12 million emails, from 2019, found a single follow-up lifted replies by 65.8 percent.

How to judge the page

Not every link page is worth being on. Check that:

• The page is indexed and gets some traffic or has links pointing at it.
• Someone maintains it.
• It does not list everyone who asks. A page with hundreds of unrelated links is a link directory by another name, and low-quality directory links are named in Google’s link spam policy.

Our guide to vetting a publisher has the full checklist.

The risks

There are no spam footprints in the honest version of either tactic. Two things to watch:

• Sender reputation. Templated mass emails get marked as spam and damage your sending domain.
• The grey variant. Some operators buy the expired domain behind a dead resource and redirect it to their own site to capture its links. That is expired domain work, which Google added to its spam policies in March 2024, and it sits at a higher risk level than anything on this page.

Who it suits

Education, health, public sector topics and technical fields, where old resource pages are common. It also suits safety, financial literacy and local topics for resource pages. It is a poor fit for young commercial niches where such pages were never built.

When not to use it

Skip these tactics if you have nothing non-commercial to offer, or if your field has few old resource pages. Skip them too if you have not yet fixed the broken links pointing at your own site. Link reclamation recovers links you already earned, costs less, and should come first.