Broken link building without pretending you have an index

Broken link building is an outreach tactic: find a page that cites a dead URL, offer a live replacement (yours, if it honestly fits), ask the editor to update the href. It is not a Chrome feature. It is email plus a list.

A site crawler or an Ahrefs export of other people’s 404s is how agencies used to source prospects. Advanced Broken Links Search does not crawl the web for you. It scans the page or site you opened.

What the extension is for here

• You already have a list of prospect URLs. Open each, scan, confirm the citation is still 404, grab the surrounding text.
• You are the publisher. Scan your articles for outbound rot, fix them before you lecture anyone else. See link rot.
• You found a dead resource you could replace. Check that your own URL returns 200, including images.

What it is not

It is not a backlink index, a prospecting crawl, or a mail merge. If a vendor sells “10,000 broken link opportunities,” that is their crawl, not this toolbar.

Do the outreach with a real substitute page. A 301 from your thin tag archive to the homepage is not a substitute. Editors can tell.

Do broken links affect SEO? is a different question: your own 404s. This article is about their 404s as a conversation opener. Keep the jobs separate.