PSA: I saw a 40% jump in organic traffic after fixing broken backlinks for a client.
I was working on a site for a small law firm in Austin. Their traffic had been flat for about six months. I ran a full backlink audit with Ahrefs and found over 200 links from decent local news sites and directories that were just dead, 404 errors. Instead of just letting them go, I spent two weeks doing outreach. I emailed the webmasters, offered a fresh, updated link to a relevant page on my client's site. I got about 30 of those links restored. Within the next 60 days, their organic traffic shot up from roughly 2k to 2.8k visitors a month. It wasn't some fancy new tactic, just cleaning up what was already there but broken. The links had authority, and Google seemed to reward fixing them more than I expected. Has anyone else seen a big win just from link repair instead of only chasing new ones?