The Impact of Broken Links on Your Website’s SEO and How to Fix Them

Broken links can have a significant impact on your website’s SEO, and learning how to fix broken links is crucial for maintaining a healthy website. When a website has broken links, it means that certain pages or resources on the website are no longer available, resulting in a poor user experience. In addition, broken links can affect your search engine rankings as they signal to search engines that your website is not being maintained properly. If you want to know what broken links are, this is the right place to learn about them.  We also explain how you can check for broken links on a website, how it impacts your website’s SEO and tips to fix them thereby ensuring your website remains SEO-friendly.

What Are Broken Links?

Broken links, also known as dead links, are links on a website that no longer work or lead to a web page that does not exist anymore. When a user clicks on a broken link, they will typically see an error message such as “404 Not Found” or “Page Not Found”. Broken links can negatively affect a website’s user experience, as users are unable to access the content they were looking for.

Additionally, broken links on a website can harm search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, as search engines may view them as a sign of poor quality or outdated content. Therefore, it’s important for website owners and administrators to regularly check for broken links on websites and fix them asap.

How Do Broken Links Impact SEO?

Broken links can have a negative impact on SEO as they can cause frustration for website visitors and harm a website’s credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines. When search engines crawl a website and encounter broken links, they may assume that the website is outdated or poorly maintained, which can lead to a lower search ranking. Additionally, broken links can cause search engine crawlers to spend less time indexing a website, which can also affect its ranking.

To check for broken links on a website, using tools such as Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, etc. will be helpful. They can help identify broken links, their location on the website, and the pages that they affect. To fix broken links, website owners can either update the link to point to the correct destination or remove the link altogether if it is no longer necessary. 

If a page that a broken link points to no longer exists, website owners can consider creating a new page with similar content or redirecting the broken link to a relevant page on their website. Learning how to fix broken links is important for maintaining a good user experience and improving a website’s SEO. Website owners should regularly check for broken links and take appropriate action to ensure that their website is functioning properly and providing valuable content for visitors.

Checking for Broken Links on Websites

Now you know what broken links are and how they negatively impact user experience, decrease website traffic, harm SEO efforts, etc. it’s time to know to check for them on your website. However, before checking, you must know how to identify them. For that, we have listed out some tools you can use to check for broken links on website:

Google Search Console

This free tool provided by Google allows you to monitor your website’s performance and identify any issues. You can use the tool to check for broken link seo on your site by navigating to the Coverage section and selecting “Error” from the drop-down menu.

Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to check for broken links on your WordPress site. The plugin can identify broken links in posts, pages, comments, and other areas of your site.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a website crawling tool that allows you to analyze your website’s links, images, and other elements. You can use the tool to identify broken links by running a crawl and looking for pages with 404 errors.

How to Fix Broken Links?

There are several steps you can take to fix broken links on your website:

Identify the broken links

Use a tool like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, or Broken Link Checker to identify broken links on your website. Once you’ve identified them, make a list of the broken links.

Update or remove the broken links

Depending on the type of broken link seo, there are a few different ways to fix them. If the broken link is pointing to a page that no longer exists, you can either update the link to point to a new page or remove the link altogether. If the broken link is pointing to a page that has moved to a new URL, you can update the link to point to the new URL.

Redirect the broken link

If you can’t update the link to point to a new page, you can set up a redirect from the broken URL to a new page. This ensures that anyone who clicks on the broken link will be redirected to a page that’s still live on your website.

Check internal & external links

It’s also important to check for broken internal links on your website. Internal links are links that point to other pages on your website whereas external links point to other websites. If these links are broken, they can negatively impact user experience and SEO efforts and harm your website’s credibility. Using tools like Ahrefs helps check for broken internal & external links and fix them as needed.

Conclusion

Understanding how to fix broken links can be a time-consuming process, especially if your website has a lot of pages. However, it’s an important task that can improve user experience, increase website traffic, and boost SEO efforts. Overall, fixing broken links on a website is an important aspect of maintaining a healthy and optimized website. By regularly checking for and fixing broken links, you can ensure that your website is functioning properly and providing a positive user experience.