All About Broken Links and SEO

Isn’t this a bad impression? Instead of getting the promised information from the search results, it sends the message “Sorry, the page was not found”

If this has happened to the people who visited your site,what do you think they stay on your website? We’re telling you: they’ll probably hit the back button which means you’ve lost a potential customer. And how much do you know before that?

You can convince yourself that they will come back, but unfortunately, the statistics go against you. 88% of online users are less likely to visit the site again after a bad experience. So, this broken link not only threatened your audience but also damaged your reputation.

What is a Broken Link?

A broken link is a link that you clicked on, but that doesn’t work or takes you to the page you need to see. Imagine searching for photography courses on Google. Clicking on one of the results will bring you to a web page containing the course promised in the search results. If the link doesn’t work, you’ll get an undetected 404 error page instead indicating that the page you’re looking for is unavailable.

There are several reasons for breaking the bond. The web server always returns an error message when a user tries to access a broken link. Here are some examples of error codes your web server may return:

  • 400 Bad Request: The page URL is not recognized by the host server.
  • 404 page not found: The page/resource does not exist on the server.
  • Invalid Code: Invalid HTTP Response Code: The server response violates the HTTP specification.
  • Invalid host: Invalid hostname: The server with this name does not exist or is unavailable.
  • Invalid URL: Invalid URL (e.g. missing brackets, extra printing, invalid protocol, etc.)
  • Empty: The host server returns an “empty” response without content and response code.
  • Reset The host server disconnects. Misconfigured or too busy.
  • Timeout: Timeout: HTTP should keep stopping when authenticating a contact.

If so, what is the cause of the broken link? The most common causes:

  • Loop generation input
  • Delete images, videos, files, or entire web pages
  • Forgetting to rename or move pages and update internal links
  • Links to content such as deleted or deleted images, videos, PDF files
  • Change your domain name and move your site to a new URL
  • In any case, broken links are annoying bugs that require immediate repair.

Let’s take a look at how broken links can damage your site.

Are Broken Links Hurting SEO?

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Dead links mostly affect Google search results, not normal SEO. But that means it becomes ruthless and stops repairing broken links. If you don’t recover, your website may crash or crash. When you focus on growing your business, you don’t want your site to be empty or abandoned.

Google’s search quality guidelines use dead links to determine website quality. So, if you are concerned about the quality of your website, fix it as soon as you discover the problem. Broken links may not look so bad at first. But the truth is, it can seriously damage your website, reputation, and business. This can damage your search engine rankings and website user experience, as well as lead to customer and revenue loss.

User Experience

User experience affects SEO. If you have a lot of dead links, your user experience is compromised and automatically reflected in your search engine optimization efforts. Search engines may find broken links, but real users may not forgive them. When internet users stumble upon a broken link, they don’t want to explore other pages (because they can’t!).

Bounce rate

Repairing a broken connection can be of great help in lowering bounce rates. If the people visiting your site can’t find the information you’re looking for, you’ll be taken immediately to various websites where you can access this information. I don’t want the simple task of repairing dead loops that are hindering business growth. On the flip side, a high bounce rate raises a red flag on your website that your content isn’t a good fit for search engine users. Therefore, it’s critical to deliver a good user experience by never directing users to broken link pages.

Your reputation and income

No matter how much time and resources you spend driving potential customers to your site, finding the wrong website wastes all your effort. How can I trust credit card information or transfer of information to an unreliable website that is not working? It takes time to build trust, but it only takes a minute to lose. Google claims that one or two broken links on the site don’t affect your search engine ranking (SERP) ranking, but the effect works the other way too.

How do you find broken links?

If you don’t have a large website and no external links, you just need to check the website whenever you update or change it. However, if you only have a few links to your site, you should check for broken links at least once a month.

If your website is large, check it out at least once a week. This is especially true if your website is ignoring health and functionality, as larger websites are more likely to generate more broken links. The best way to track down these issues is to monitor your website. If you notice changes in conversion rates, bounce rates, or traffic, you may have a problem. In most cases, these issues are usually related to broken links on your site.

It’s difficult to manually check all the links on your website, so our team uses SEOPressor Connect, another website link checker that anyone can easily use.

How to fix broken links

Here’s the best way to help you fix all deadlink issues.

  • Avoid deep links on your website if you don’t need them: Deep connections (also known as anchors or internal links) are important, but don’t use them unless necessary. If you have to use them, make a timetable to find the dead.
  • Check for crawl errors from Google: As we saw above, Google Search Console allows you to identify dead links on your site. Search Console will help you find relevance (404) and unrelated errors.
  • Using a redirect mechanism: This method redirects the user to a new location with information when it detects a dead link. To redirect the dead page (301) to a new location.
  • Here are some additional redirect tips: Redirect (301) broken pages to other related pages on the site. It finds relevant content on your site and redirects dead pages to that page.
  • External link recovery: If the external link is not working, you can visit the relevant website and ask for an answer. Fix dead links to other websites in your head.
  • Content recovery and replacement of broken URLs: Find out what the broken side is and replace or remake.
  • Leave it as 404: It is better to display a 404 page when the dedicated page is no longer available. It is better to display 404 “hard” rather than “soft” 404.
  • Do a content freshness: Rather than removing the pages with thin content and broken links, try to update the information present on that page. This will help prevent unwanted 404s that could result from deleting info that your other site pages are linking to.

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How to prevent your site from broken links?

The easiest way is to always copy it without entering the URL. It may seem obvious, but some people enter the URL anyway! Here are some ways to avoid broken links:

  1. When adding a link to a page, make sure the URL is fully compatible, use the full URL and not start with www, but start with HTTPS://.
  2. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, post your post or page first before copying the link.
  3. When linking to a source, always check your reputation on the website. There is one thing you can do to get the source through a web search, but before you add your site as an external link, make sure your site has been working for years.
  4. Before adding a link to your site, you can also make sure it is safe to link to your site. A malicious bot can crawl your site and eventually reach your site, causing problems with your servers.
  5. Make sure to use a tool like broken link checker to ensure you don’t miss out on any misplacements with the links. If you’re using WordPress, you should be able to identify both external and internal broken anchor links. We recommend pasting them in an Excel spreadsheet so you can revisit and fix them later.

Conclusion

Your website should provide a user-friendly experience by targeting people with valuable content. However, if you send it to a broken link or a broken page, you will quickly lose it. It’s more important to make sure your website works well, rather than bothering you by sending your customers to old pages. The time to understand the real benefits of checking and updating your links regularly is now.