Using Google To Get Wikipedia Backlinks
If WikiGrabber doesn’t seem like your kind of tool (for whatever reason) all is not lost. You can use good old Google to find your dead links too.
Just head over to Google and use this advanced query:
site:wikipedia.org “Keyword phrase” “dead link”
- If I use this for a similar category to above, search engines, I’m greeting with a lot of pages showing a dead link:
- By clicking on one I’m able to use the exact same ctrl+f method to find the dead link. Like so:
- This method is just as simple, but you’ll have to do a little more work on finding the relevant pages. But it’s there if you need it.
- So now you know how to find the broken link opportunities, let’s look at how you can get the actual links for yourself…
- Wikipedia Link Building In Action (And How To Do It Yourself)
- Now you’re armed with a Wikipedia link building tool – be it WikiGrabber or Google Advanced Search – let’s look at a specific example, selected at random – Binoculars.
- If I run this through WikiGrabber you will find a bunch of pages about binoculars that feature broken links:
I’m going to choose this option because it’s hyper-relevant to the binoculars niche (based on zero experience with binoculars):
And on the page we can confirm that, yes, it does have a dead link:
Now copy and paste the URL and head over to the Wayback Machine tool.
Copy the link into the search bar and hit go:
This will show us what the page used to look like before it was taken down. Have a read of the content to see if it’s related to your website.
If it is relevant to your site you either need to find content that you’ve created which could fill this hole. Or, you need to create the content that fits.
You can even just rewrite the content that shows up in the Wayback Machine if that really floats your boat.
And if it’s not relevant, keep following these steps until you find something that is relevant.
But let’s say for argument’s sake that it is relevant to your site. Here comes the really fun part…
Take the dead link and run it through a tool like Ahrefs, Majestic, or backlink o to see all of the backlinks pointing to it.
As you can see with this one there are 34 links and 14 domains pointing in its direction:
30 or more is a good number of links to have because it means it’s worth the effort. Why?
Because it’s a topic people want or need to link to.
It gives you a lot of options for webmasters to write to (success rates aren’t always high).
And it means it’s worth investing your time in creating the content should you need to.
And because this link needs updating, it’s time for you to swoop in and make it happen.
Either create a new page as I mentioned earlier or update your existing content to fit this topic.
Make sure it ticks all of the boxes that a Wikipedia page would need to use this blog post as a reference.
Then you want to export the list of websites from Ahrefs that currently link to the dead link and look up all of the contact details. A tool like Hunter can help you with that.
Then you can send an outreach email to each of those to let them know about the broken link and your potential replacement.