Does your site have broken links? If yes, you must be wondering about how to fix broken links. Broken links can cause your website to look unprofessional. You must be incredibly careful and clean up your website. With a regular broken link audit, you can find and fix the broken links on your webpage. Once you have successfully identified the broken links, you can update the URL if the content still exists. You might also set up a “301” redirect to guide website users to the relevant page. Another option would be to remove the links altogether. The key is to use a dedicated SEO tool to regularly monitor broken links to give your user a flawless user experience.
What is A Broken Link on A Website?
You should know that broken links are also known as dead links or 404 errors. These are hyperlinks on the website that no longer direct to the intended destination. What happens is that instead of directing users to a specific webpage or resource. Clicking on a broken link results in an error page, which indicates that the desired content cannot be found.
How to Fix Broken Links – The Effect of Broken Links on SEO?
Before we explore our options for how to fix broken links, let us explore the importance of broken links in SEO. The first thing you should know is that broken links create a bad user experience. When website visitors click on broken links, they become unable to access their intended content. Understandably, this experience can cause frustration and a poor impression of the website.
It can also lead to a loss of faith as website users will leave your website and look for their desired information somewhere else, which in turn can increase your bounce rate and potentially decrease overall user engagement.
You should also know that search engine crawlers, such as Google bots, regularly scan websites to collect information and update search engine index pages. So, when crawlers come across broken links, they can’t follow them to index the linked content. As a result, the affected pages might not be included in search engine results, which, in turn, reduces their visibility to potential visitors.
Broken Links Harm User Experience and Website Authority
Search engines consider various aspects when determining the rankings of the webpage in search results. On that note, user experience and website quality are crucial ranking signals. Since broken links can actually harm user experience and hinder search engine crawling, they can also indirectly affect your SEO rankings.
Websites with a high number of broken links can be seen as less reliable and authoritative by search engines. In SEO, links play a significant role in establishing the authority and relevance of web pages. When a broken link exists on a website, it disrupts the flow of link equity. Link equity refers to the value of authority that is passed on from one page to another through links. If an important webpage has broken links, it may not receive the full benefit of incoming links, which can potentially affect the overall authority and ranking.
How to Find Broken Backlinks –Basic Steps
Now that you know the impact of broken links on your website, let us explore how you can find broken backlinks. Here are the steps:
Perform Site Audit
Using the right tool, such as Semrush’s tool for site audit, you can successfully identify more than one hundred on-page and technical issues, and broken links are one of them. Using the right SEO tool, you can perform regular site checks to stay on top of the potential problems that your website might come across.
Using Semrush, you should click on “Create Project” and follow the prompts to complete the setup of the project. After completing the project, you must select the option of “Start Site Audit.” Once the audit is ready, choose the “Issues” tab and type “broken” in the search bar to find broken links.
You will get a list of broken pages on your website. Click on the listed URLs to access more information. The next screens will take you to the option of “#URLs,” from where you can see all broken links.
Regular site audits can help you automatically detect the following:
- Broken links
- Low-speed pages
- Pages that pose security risks
- Pages with duplicate content
Use Google Search Console
GSC, or Google Search Console, is essentially a free tool that website owners like you can use to analyze their website’s presence in Google search results. You can access the Page Indexing report to identify the presence of broken links.
Now, you might be wondering about how you can assess this Page Indexing report. To access this report, you must log into Google Search Console and proceed to navigate to the left-hand menu, where you will find the option of “Indexing Pages.”
The subsequent report will take you to a list of indexed pages that have 404 errors.
Use Browser Extensions
To find broken links, you can use browser extensions, such as “Check My Links,” to automatically check the links and identify broken links on web pages that you browse. The browser extensions will highlight the broken links. All you need to do is install the browser extensions in Chrome to add a plugin icon right next to the search engine’s address bar.
While you browse the web pages on your website or another website, the browser extension will analyze all backlinks in the background. All backlinks that return 404 errors will be highlighted on the webpage.
Check for Broken Links Manually
Another strategy would be to manually check your website for broken links. Now, this might be a time-consuming process; however, it will help you find broken links. All you need to do is navigate through each of the web pages and manually click on every link. After clicking the link, you should observe how the page loads.
If you detect that a link takes you to an error message, such as “404 Not Found,” then you know that you have a broken link. So, the key is to click on each link one after the other and assess whether or not each and every link takes you to the intended destination.
How to Fix Broken Internal Links – Basic Steps
Now that you know how you can find broken links using various methods, it is time to explore the basic steps that can help you with fixing broken links. It is important to mention here that you could be fixing internal or external broken links on your site, or you could be fixing broken backlinks to your site. With that said, there are three ways to fix broken links.
Update Broken Links
You might be surprised to know that updating broken links is one of the simplest ways to fix them. For instance, in the case of a typo in the URL, the only thing you need to do is update it by swapping the current URL with the correct URL. Subsequently, you will fix the link. However, you must know that this method will only work if a misspelled URL has been the cause of the broken link.
Remove Broken Links
Now, if there is no mistake in the URL regarding its spelling, your next best option should be to remove the broken link. Also, if you no longer need the link, you can simply remove it. This could be an ideal case if you have updated the content on the page with the link or the page that the link is directed to.
Insert a 301 Redirect
Another way to fix broken links is by inserting a 301 redirect. However, you should know that a 301 redirect is one of the most complex fixes up there. However, a 301 redirect happens to be the best option for your website’s SEO. You should insert a 301 redirect if you have moved a webpage. You can also insert a 301 redirect if you are no longer selling a service or product but have similar products or services on another page that you might be selling.
For instance, if you have a business website and one of the broken links is meant to lead to a service or product that is no longer in stock, then inserting a 301 redirect can be ideal as this 301 redirect will lead the website users to a similar service or product that can be in stock. The best part is that you no longer have to deal with a broken link.
Nonetheless, if none of the above mentioned examples fit your situation, inserting a 301 redirect is definitely not in your best interest. The underlying reason is that a 301 redirect that leads to an irrelevant page will affect your website’s user experience and website rankings.
Fixing External Broken Links
Now, if you have a broken external link or links that are leading to nowhere, these do not add value to your webpage content. You can use a tool to check the external links for accuracy. If you detect broken external links, your best step is to replace the broken external links with active links. Or you have the option of removing the broken external links altogether.
Your first step should be to check the external link for a typo. Any extra digit, dash, or letter can direct the user to a 404 page. If the intended page is still live, your best option is to copy and paste the URL again to establish accuracy.
However, if you find that the linking page no longer exists, the best option is to remove the external link. You can also look for an alternative source with which you can replace the external link.
Leverage Broken Link Building
The last step is to opt for broken link building. You might have heard about broken link building before, which is a great method to fix broken links. The key is to use broken links to your advantage and make the most of the broken links of your competitors. In return for high-quality backlinks, you will offer a valuable web page or content to link to.
You can use a tool, such as Semrush’s tool, to accurately identify the broken links on your competitors’ websites. If you want to see these links as a brilliant opportunity, reach out to the webmasters. Subsequently, you should suggest that they link to the content of your webpage on relevant topics instead.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know how to fix broken links, you might have gotten an idea about the importance of regularly performing site audits so that you can carefully monitor external, internal, and backlinks. We already told you in the beginning about the extensive damage that broken links can do to your website’s SEO. You will lose your website’s rankings in Google results, and your website users will lose trust in your website. They will leave your website and search for their desired information somewhere else. Nonetheless, you can also get in touch with a well-reputed link-building agency, such as Globex Outreach, and have an expert SEO team perform the link audits for you.
FAQs
What are broken links?
Broken links are errors in a website that aren’t linked to any pages. The links on a website are usually made to carry link juice or the traffic from one webpage to another. Broken links indicate that the web pages are not linking correctly, and online visitors cannot access the information.
How do broken links affect your SEO?
Broken links can hinder Google from crawling and indexing your website. Google doesn’t want to direct users to result pages that are broken links. Broken links can affect the rankings of your website and also damage your website’s reputation.
What is a backlink audit about?
A backlink audit is the process of analyzing the relevance, quality, and quantity of the links that are pointing to your website. A detailed link audit can give you helpful information, including the presence of broken links.
