It may not seem like a big deal at first, but broken links on your website can be detrimental to the health of your business. Not only do they make for a terrible user experience, but they can also negate the results of any search engine optimization (SEO) that you’ve been doing. To many, it feels like tracking down and fixing these broken links is an insurmountable task, but with a little know-how it becomes a relatively straightforward process for an SEO consultant.
How Broken Links Affect SEO
When most people are using a search engine, they are trying to get what they need as fast as possible. When a potential customer manages to find your website, but is then met with broken links, they are not likely to stick around and try to navigate around them. It is estimated that the first five results of a Google search receive 67.6% of clicks. A bad user experience will not help your site rank high within organic search results. Broken links can also lose the authoritative equity they once had. Increased bounce rates and decreased conversion rates can result in negative impacts on your site’s SEO efforts.
URL Changes and Redirects
Broken links often occur due to a change in the URL. It does not matter whether it was intentional or accidental. When the URL of a web page is changed, any links that previously linked to that webpage will result in a 404 error. Rather than try and find all of the links to that web page and fix them, it is often easier to redirect them to the new URL. In most cases this will fix any links that were broken by the URL change.
Changes to URL Structure
It should be noted that any change to the URL could result in a broken link. The URL does not need to be changed completely for this to take place. For example, even the simple addition of a hyphen between two words will render an old link completely useless. Any changes to URL structure should be noted so that you can make proper redirects to the new page.
Page No Longer Exists (404 Error)
It has happened to all of us. You’re surfing the Web, you click a link, and in big bold letters you see “404 Error, page no longer exists”. This is usually the error message that will be displayed when a link is broken. Most commonly, this will be due to either a change in the URL or the web page being deleted completely. However, it is also possible to receive this message if the server running the website is down or the connection is broken. In this case, the link will behave like it is broken, even though its URL is correct and the web page has not been deleted. A great way to avoid problems like these is to never have them in the first place. Hiring a professional web developer and SEO consultant to build and optimize your website helps you prevent errors before they occur.
Submitted URL Has Crawl Issue
One of the most useful tools when it comes to finding and fixing broken links is Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a tool provided by Google that is used to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google search results. An added benefit of utilizing Google Search Console is the “crawl errors report”. This is a report that gives you a list of all pages on your site that are returning a 404 error to Google. It will also show you which pages link to the page with the 404 error, allowing you to find the broken links and fix them.
Using the crawl errors report is priceless when it comes to finding broken links and is an important step when conducting a website audit. Without the use of this tool, one would have to manually find every page linking to the 404 error URL, a process that could take hours, if not days.
Another useful feature is the “remove URL” tool. This allows you to temporarily block a URL from appearing in Google search results, which can be useful if you want to stop Google from crawling broken links while they are being fixed. However, you should not use the remove URL tool as a permanent solution to preventing these pages from getting indexed. There is still a risk that Google could crawl pages that were temporarily removed from indexing. To ensure that Google does not crawl pages that you do not want to show up in search results, you should instead add a NoIndex tag to those pages.
