Chance to grab great links for your Music / Band / Singer websites!

[SteveGG]

I just spotted that it appears the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has closed down their music subdomain (music.cbc.ca) and are moving things to cbcmusic.ca .... but they've crapped the bed on transitioning old articles to the new site, resulting in - at least currently, and possibly permanently - links to old articles either going to a 404 page or redirecting to their cbcmusic.ca homepage.

Go to the NEWS section of Google and type:
site:music.cbc.ca

At least as of the past 24 hours or so - and probably longer - all article links are dead.

I see a comment on their Facebook page by someone attempting to draw their attention to the problem:
"Hi CBC, The link to the article seems to be broken? I read the article a few days ago (Sun June 26, 2016), but seems to be broken a few days later. Could you please fix ? Would love to share with others."

Anyone with a website about music (singers/bands) could capitalize on this by locating other sites who have linked to the old CBC Music articles, let them know they have a dead link, and suggest they switch it to link to your own site's relevant article.

Since there are probably 1000s of now dead articles to choose from, just concentrating on the most linked to articles and/or very best quality linking websites would make things easier to create an option. All it takes is a few great ones to make a difference. Probably other ways to exploit this as well.

I did something similar a few years back when a local institution switched to a new CMS, and all inbound links that were gathered over 10 years redirected to their new homepage. Found the most popular pages for the institution's news section and contacted websites that linked to them. Got some really good backlinks for my own site that way.

FYI.
EDIT: Just as an example of a site with a dead link, here's a post on the Contents subdomain of Volkswagon Canada - link under the second pic "CBC Beetle" now simply redirects to the cbcmusic.ca homepage, not the original article.
http://contents.vw.ca/blog/en/cbc-beetle-roadtrip/

 

[Samwise89]

I'm thinking out loud. Is this how you'd handle this?

1. Find article with tons of links
2. Rewrite it and post it
3. Scrape contact info for all those links
4. Do the "favor" of letting them know about the broken link and mention your own alternative?

Do you mention your own or do you pretend its just another quality resource by someone else? Should you be transparent or what?

 

[SteveGG]

That's pretty much it. At a minimum - rewrite the original.

In the case of me snagging a few great links from that institution's site, I contacted someone in their Communications Dept and asked if I could repost their (now broken linked) media releases on my own site and they happily agreed. So I didn't even have to rewrite them!

Best, most optimum practice, however, would be to create an article even better than the one originally linked to, as that's even more incentive for the website owner to change the link to your site.

Ultimately, you're doing them a favor by pointing out their broken link. Then it's just a matter of whether they'll return the favor or not.