Here are what you are going to learn in this piece:
- What broken website links are
- Reasons for broken links
- Harmful effects of broken links
- How to repair broken page links
What are broken website links?
Website links are highlighted or underlined words which can be clicked to arrive at another page on the website or at another website entirely. Broken links are no links which no longer serve their purpose or link to anywhere else. Broken links are also called dead links.
With broken or dead links, human users are not able to move from one page to the other. And search engine bots are not able to index or crawl web pages efficiently. This may affect SEO and search ranking, but more importantly, it depicts the website owner as careless and irresponsible.
Reasons for broken links
Broken or dead links occur for a number of reasons. Some of these are as follows –
- The web page or website linked to no longer exists
- The website or page linked to has a restricted access due to a firewall
- The url of the web page linked to is spelled wrongly
- The website owner mistakenly linked to the wrong web page or url
There may be some other reasons for broken links but whatever they are, it is best to scan for website for broken links and fix them immediately.
Harmful effects of broken links
Broken links are bad for your website and they are bad for business. It affects your SEO ranking and makes it harder for potential customers to locate you in search engine results. But worse of all, it negatively affects your online reputation and business brand. When customers who have a mind to buy from you visit your website and experience the dead or broken links, they see you as irresponsible and unreliable.
The reason for this perception is clear: if you are serious about your business and brand, you will fix all broken links leading to more sales. With poor user experience emanating from broken links, users leave your site and never return again. Your online reputation suffers and you lose sales as a result. Your web traffic drops and if you are not careful, you may soon close business. You must not take broken links on your site with levity – fix them right now or they may fix your business.
How to repair broken page links
You must first locate broken and dead links on your site before you can choose to fix them. You can use Site Audit to perform a live crawl of your website to find any broken links, and you can use Site Explorer to find broken external links to your site. Google Analytics or Google Search Console can also be used to find bad links.
You can fix the bad links by replacing them with live, functional ones and you can ultimately remove them entirely. You can also redirect to the new page or even leave it as a hard 404 page. These are things you can do yourself or even ask a SEO professional to help out at an affordable price. It must be disclosed that the more functional your web links, the more link juice your obtain from other websites linking to you.