Kimi k3, my new head of SEO Link-Outreach (Broken Link Building Edition)

If you want high-authority backlinks but

↳ Your outreach keeps getting ignored

↳ The best links you want point to pages that no longer exist

↳ You can't spend every week hunting dead pages and email addresses

Then here is the broken-link building system I would turn into a repeatable AI workflow.

Automate it with Claude, Codex or Cursor using one SEO Skill.

> A Pew Research study published in 2024 found that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible ten years later. A quarter of every page that existed between 2013 and 2023 is already gone.

— "Analysis by Pew Research Center"

Every one of those dead pages that still has backlinks is an opening. And backlinks still decide who wins

You're probably stuck in this workflow:

↳ Export a competitor's backlinks.

↳ Open pages one by one to see which ones 404.

↳ Paste referring domains into a sheet.

↳ Guess at contact emails.

↳ Send everyone the same template.

↳ Get ignored, because to them the link still works.

The problem is that you are asking for a favor.

Nobody edits their article to do a stranger a favor.

A better workflow starts by finding proof that something is already broken on their side:

↳ A competitor page that returns a 404 but still has backlinks.

↳ A link to a discontinued product or an acquired company.

↳ A resource that now redirects to a homepage.

↳ A citation to data that is years out of date. ↳ A mention of your brand with no link attached.

Then you hand them the fix.

Here are the 7 broken-link workflows I would automate 👇

1️⃣ Find competitor 404s that still have live backlinks.

— "Claude + Kimi _ Distribb SEO skill found these 404 pages on one of my competitors website."

This is the whole game. A dead page with 40 referring domains is 40 links waiting for a new home.

The workflow:

↳ Pull the backlink profile for three to five competitors.

↳ Flag every page returning a 404 or a soft 404.

↳ Sort them by referring domains, highest first.

↳ Keep the dead pages that sit inside your topic.

↳ Drop the low-quality or irrelevant prospects.

Start with the dead page holding the most links, not the first one you find.

That single sort decides where your week goes.

2️⃣ Reverse-engineer why each dead page earned its links.

A link is a vote for a specific reason. Before you build anything, find the reason.

Check what the original page actually was:

↳ A statistics or benchmark page?

↳ A free tool or template?

↳ A definitive guide?

↳ A founder interview or original research?

Pull the old version from the Wayback Machine and read what those sites chose to cite.

You are not copying the page.

You are copying the reason it earned a link.

3️⃣ Build a replacement worth linking to.

— "The replacement article I wrote at Distribb.io"

Now create something that genuinely replaces the missing resource.

↳ Match the original intent, not just the topic.

↳ Make it current, and put a visible update date on it.

↳ Add the data, chart or template the old page was missing.

↳ Publish it on a clean, linkable URL.

Don't point them at your homepage unless it truly replaces what died.

The closer your page matches the original reason for the link, the stronger the pitch.

4️⃣ Write outreach that fixes instead of begs.

— "Automated 404 broken link outreach feature at distribb.io"

Your email now solves a real problem for them:

> "Your article links to a resource that no longer exists. We built an updated replacement here."

That is the entire pitch.

↳ Name the exact article and the exact dead link.

↳ Show the replacement in one line.

↳ Make the swap a two-second decision.

You are not asking for a favor.

You are fixing their broken page.

That is why this outreach gets answered. But get ready to pay in a lot of cases, if you have an affiliate program, this is a great time to leverage it.

5️⃣Run the whole thing at a fraction of the cost with Kimi K3.

Here is the part almost nobody is doing yet.

The hunting stage is heavy work for Claude. Crawling for 404s, checking archives, sorting referring domains, verifying contacts. It is heavy on tokens and light on judgment.

So stop paying frontier prices for it.

Kimi K3 just launched. It scores 57 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index next to Claude Fable 5 at 60, its output tokens run about a third of the price, and cached input comes in up to 10x cheaper.

The setup:

↳ Install the Kimi CLI. (ask Claude to do this, get your API key at https://platform.kimi.ai/)

↳ Ask Claude to run the digging as Kimi K3 subagents.

↳ Keep the judgment on Claude: which links to chase, what to build, how to pitch.

Claude thinks. Kimi digs.

You crawl far more dead pages for the same budget, then spend the savings on the outreach that actually earns the link.

Doing all of this by hand is a full-time job. So we automated it inside the Distribb AI SEO Skill as a Link Outreach feature. Here's my Co-Founder explaining:

Embedded post:

Author: Florian Darroman (@floriandarroman) Post ID: 2079172971424579928 Source: https://x.com/floriandarroman/status/2079172971424579928 Reply to: none

Text:

> The fastest way to get recommended by AI: > > (and powerful backlinks)

Media:

• video: /media/posts/kimi-k3-my-new-head-of-seo-link-outreach-broken-link-building-edition/1.mp4

↳ Find the broken pages and rank them by referring domains.

↳ Read the original resource and its link intent.

↳ Create and publish the replacement asset.

↳ Find and verify the right contact.

↳ Draft personalized outreach and queue it for your approval.

↳ Track replies and follow-ups.

You review the opportunities worth pursuing. The system does the hunting.

Automate your broken-link building with Distribb.

Thanks for reading! 🙏

Borja