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Possibly The Greatest Broken Link Backlink Campaign Ever GeoCities

We’ve probably all received the Broken Link Detected emails sometime in the past.

They generally go along the lines of;

“Hi TJ,

I’m *** from ****. I was surfing Online and came across your article about ***, It’s a great article but I noticed you have a broken link in it pointing to **** I’ve written a similar piece here *** and are wondering if you could edit the broken link and point it there instead?
Cheers,
xxx”

Most of the time I ignore these but I had one today that I thought as so clever I couldn’t ignore it as I thought it was possibly the greatest broken link backlink campaign I had seen.

There were a couple of things I would have done different but I will come to that later.

The Broken Link Campaign Bait

The email I received was simply titled Broken Link Detected on uksbd.co.uk and went;

“Hi T J,

I’m Brian from PCGuide. I noticed that you have a broken link to www.geocities.com in your article: https://www.uksbd.co.uk/resources/.

Unfortunately, Geocities was shut down in 2009 and the site you linked to was also deleted. See the news here* (*this was a link)

Considering that, I decided to publish this article: “GeoCities – What Is It and What Happened to It?”* (*this was a link) and I believe it will be a great replacement.

In this article, I’ve covered:

. What Is GeoCities?

. What Happened to GeoCities, an internet history in the 90s?

. Alternatives to Geocities in this 2019

I’d be highly appreciated if you can spend a bit of your time to read my article and afterward, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to swap the link or not. 😀
Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks for your consideration!

Regards,
Brian”

Plain, simple and to the point.
Mentioning an old favourite and showing that he had actual seen the page on my site with a link to GeoCities, I was intrigued, so in a round about way went and read the article – Part one of campaign achieved.

What I would have done different

As mentioned previously I thought this was a great broken link backlink campaign but there are 3 things I would have done differently

1. The title of the email – Broken Link Detected on uksbd.co.uk
I nearly just trashed it, a better title would have been Broken Link to GeoCities Detected on uksbd.co.uk

2. The links in the email were using a particularly dodgy looking URL – msdzgg.net
No idea if it is a dodgy site or just used for tracking purposes, but there was no way I was going to click on it, had I not been so intrigued I would have trashed the email there and then but instead did a Google search for GeoCities – What Is It and What Happened to It? and found it that way instead.
If I was sending an email out like this I would forsake the tracking and use the genuine URL in the email.

3. The article about GeoCities – What Is It and What Happened to It?
The article itself was pretty thin, had I gone to the trouble of creating a broken link backlink campaign like this I would have put a bit more effort in to the final article

The Broken Link Campaign Result

As I thought it was so clever I feel I have to reward them for this so have linked to the article below here – GeoCities – What is It and What Happened to It?

Also a bonus link to PCGuide 😉

Part 2 of campaign Achieved

Is it connected to What Happened to theGlobe.com?

Only questions on my mind now are;

1. If I had an article about theGlobe.com would I get a similar Broken Link Detected email?
2. And are these connected to the same people ?

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