The Importance of Finding and Fixing Broken Links
Broken links on your website will harm user experience and SEO. Here’s how to find and fix them.
Have you ever clicked a link on a website, only to be greeted by a ‘page not found’ message? If you spend enough time, it’s bound to happen sooner or later. This phenomenon, also known as ‘broken links,’ isn’t just frustrating to surfers of the web; it hurts your SEO, too. Today, we’ll explain everything you need to know about broken links.
How Broken Links Harm User Experience and SEO
Let’s get this out of the way: the presence of a few broken links on your website won’t harm your SEO per se. But it does do so indirectly.
It may be helpful to start out by considering user experience. No user wants to browse a website riddled with ‘page not found’ errors. They will in all likelihood become frustrated and leave to explore another site, thus resulting in higher bounce rates. Google will recognize this, and your rankings will tank.
But broken links harm your SEO in a more technical way, too. With even a passing familiarity of SEO best practices, you should know that inbound—and, to a lesser extent, outbound—links are beneficial. But when they’re broken, they lose whatever value they’d otherwise have.
How to Find Them
Now that we’ve explained how broken links harm user experience and SEO, you might be wondering how you can find them. Sometimes, it’s not practical to go through every page on your site checking links manually. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that make this task easier.
One of the best ways to find your broken links is with Google Search Console. In your side dashboard, click ‘Crawl,’ and then ‘Crawl Errors.’ Finally, select ‘Not Found,’ and you’ll see a list of all the broken links on your website.
How to Fix Them
Next, it’s time to fix them. To do that, you’ll first have to figure out what caused them to break in the first place. Here are some potential causes:
- Typos in the URL
- Deletion of the page or image
- Renaming of the domain or URL
Once you’ve figured out what caused the error to appear, fixing it should be relatively easy. Simply fix the typo, link to the correct page, or find a new one that can serve the same purpose.
When you fix your broken links, your users will thank you. And you’ll be thankful, too, when your SEO rankings rise.
Contact Adventure Web Interactive Today
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