Updated: December 22, 2015
Part two in the How to Link Build series involves refreshing your website’s content so that it remains current. As a business owner or webmaster, you must take the time to ensure that while you’re refreshing content that you do not leave behind bits and pieces or make your content mismatched.
Why you should Update Your Content
Anyone who works with news or information knows: time is the enemy. This is because information is always changing. Moreover, as the internet grows and changes, we (the internet viewers) can face leftover loose ends when changes are made by webmasters—most often, these loose ends are outdated content and broken webpages and/or links. Therefore, it is important to clean up your website for outdated content periodically.
Updating through Broken Link Building
In addition to updating your own website, you can also help update other people’s websites—and gain links at the same time.
For example, you’ve discovered a website linking to an educational article that would be helpful for your research. However, the link does not work because either the domain has changed or the resource has been taken down. This is an example of a broken link and you can help repair it. Even better, you can still gain a link by helping.
You can contact the webmaster and make them aware their link doesn’t work (chances are they forgot it while they were updating their content). Either you can then provide them with content that you’ve created for your own site that they could link to instead or maybe you could create brand new content for them. Both of these solutions are easy and don’t require much development.
Many webmasters—especially those with big blogs or websites to manage —easily forget about some of their outbound links. Moreover, most will welcome friendly people bringing the information to their attention. Even more so when said person provides an easy fix because it is a win-win: they get their broken link fixed (along with some awesome new content) and you have added depth to your own website.
Refreshing Your Content
If you’ve tried broken link building and you’re not getting any response, you can try telling webmasters that the information they have is incorrect. Since nobody likes to be wrong (and it will hurt their credibility), you’re likely to get a response back.
Using content refreshing, you should approach it much the same way as broken link building—contact the webmaster and present your own content. However, the difference here is that you’re submitting updated content that links back to your own site. For instance, there has been a significant change in a product you sell. Chances are there is still old information around that you could update with new content.
To learn more about effective link building, read part I in our How to Link Build blog mini-series…