Worried about the ranking of your website?
Then you must know this!
According to a survey, it has been found that the thing that annoys the user most is the broken links. Moreover, they have a huge impact on the SEO of your website.
Therefore, it is a need of the hour to find and fix broken links to improve the overall ranking of your website. The reason that it affects SEO is that when a visitor meets a broken link he is likely to leave the website at the same moment.
Since the visitors are not spending time on your website due to the broken links, the search engines are going to believe that the user experience of your website is bad and will provide you with a lower rank. Even if you have really good content!
But before we start learning the methods to find and fix broken links, we need to know what exactly they are. Let us discuss it further.
What is a broken link?
The pages on your website that provide a kind message to your visitor that “the web page does not exists here or literally anywhere in the universe, please go die”.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of broken links that can exist on your website. These are:
- Internal broken links
The internal broken links are the ones that exist for your own website and an internal link, in general, is a link that redirects a user to another page on your website of which the link is.
You have got full controls over these links and you can do whatever you want to do with them within your website.
And yeah… they also affect the SEO of your website.
- External broken links
Being just the opposite of internal links, these are the broken links that are of a web page that exists on a different website. You may see several external links in this blog post as well.
How to find the broken links on your website?
Before you can fix broken links, you have to find them. And to do that, consider reading this.
If your site is not big enough and you don’t point to a lot of external links then you are just required to do a manual check once every time you make an update on the website. On the other hand, if you do point to some external links then you must check them manually once in a month.
If your website is kind of a popular one and you consider it as a large site, then it is a sure thing that you might be pointing to various external links. Therefore, you are required to perform a manual check on all the external links once every seven days.
The most beneficial method in terms of finding the broken links is to monitor your website stats. You must check the weekly difference of the factors such as bounce rate and the traffic of your website. If you notice any degrading changes in those stats then you must consider checking the links manually.
How to fix broken links?
If you wish to fix broken links then you need the help of some automated tools if you point to a lot of external links on your website. Moreover, it is a very bad practice in the eyes of SEO to leave the broken link as they are and not fixing them.
You can make a productive use of any link manager tool to find and fix broken links.
- If you wish to check for broken links and fix them with manual efforts then you must consider these factors. Moreover, you must avoid these malpractices to prevent getting a broken link on your website:
- If you have renamed a website and you forget to change the name in the internal links on your website, then all the internal links will become broken.
- If you did not format the URL in the correct way then they will turn in to broken links.
- If you have added a link to an external website and they modify the name, remove the specific content from the website, or modify the permalink, then the link will be considered as a broken link.
Therefore, make sure you make changes in the link accordingly on a timely basis to fix broken links.
Let us now look at the ill-effects of broken links on your website.
Effects of having broken links
Here are the things that will be affected majorly due to broken links:
- Revenue of your website: if the conversion page is dead then what is the purpose of all the traffic and SEO? In simple words, you won’t earn a single penny due to broken links.
- Bounce rate of your website: As mentioned in the beginning, a user will leave the website as soon as he hits a broken link. Therefore, a broken link means a high bounce rate and low rankings.
There are other effects as well but these were the prominent ones.
Conclusion
So that was all about the methods to find and fix broken links. If you wish to know more about SEO, visit this tutorial by LiquidBlox