Broken Link Checker + Screenshot = Link Building Success

A few years ago I wrote a post on how to Combine the powers of Markup and Check My Links. I’ve come to realize that it’s not only a few years old, but Markup no longer operates. I thought it would be good to take a page out of my own book and re-visit the topic and provide up to date and additional information on how to visually present website owners with outdated and broken links on their webpages.

If you do a lot of link building like myself, you know that broken link building is an effective method for getting relevant links from high quality sources.

However the process of reaching out to the website owners and detailing the broken links on a page isn’t always a quick process. It also isn’t always easy to communicate with other webmasters with what’s going on with their website. They may have multiple broken links on their website, and it is not time well spent if you have to identify all the broken links and where they are located on their page. If only there was a fast way to visually show where bad links are located on a page. Hmmmm…

That’s where Markup became such a big help for me. It allowed me to send a screenshot of exactly what I was viewing on my page. To summarize the steps:

  1. Run any link checker like Check My Links on a page to highlight broken links.
  2. Run a screenshot or screencast tool to capture images on the page
  3. Share with website owner so they can visually see issues on their page

Pretty simple right? All you need is a good screenshot and backlink checker to do the job. To avoid tools going defunct I’ll list mutiple options that you get to choose from. Here are a few that work really well:

Broken Link Checkers

I should mention that all of the below tools are free.

check-my-linksCheck My Links

Probably the industry standard for quite some time, and for good reason. It’s fast and it gets the job done. They recently made a few updates that allow you to exclude particular domains.

LinkMiner

A great link checker from the folks at Point Blank SEO. If you use a URL opening tool to supplement link building you can run LinkMiner on all open pages at once. Saves you a lot of clicking.

You can also link up Ahrefs or Majestic to display backlink metrics for links located on a webpage.

Domain Hunter Plus

Domain Hunter Plus helps you search for available domains located on a webpage while providing backlink metrics for all external links that you can export to a .csv file. Oh, it also quickly provides the error status codes for all outbound links on a webpage.

Screenshot/Screencast Tools

Jing

qsnapGreat free screenshot and screencast tool from Techsmith. You not only can take screenshots but you can take quick videos that are easy to share.

qSnap

This tool acts as a browser extension and lets you take snapshots of the entire webpage as opposed to a small section. Download the images as an image file or share via URL.

Michael Hall

Michael Hall is an Account Manager at Netvantage Marketing, which specializes in SEO, PPC and social media. Mike also runs our Denver office.

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