When you promote your business online and do Search Engine Optimization, you often encounter an unwelcome obstacle to your endeavors: some links you put on your website get broken. You connect your content to another relevant website and hope that your visitors will follow your prompt, acquiring additional information and learning more about your business. But then you discover that the link you so thoughtfully provided leads nowhere. Your visitors click the link and, instead of gaining knowledge, come to a dead end.
Such a scenario is frustrating. But unfortunately, it is common, and nobody who deals with SEO or posts content online ever managed to avoid it. And because people often find their links broken, many solutions have been offered to this problem. In the this article, we explain why links malfunction and what you need to do to repair the glitch.
What Causes Broken Links?
A broken or dead link is a link that does not take your visitors to the page to which it is supposed to lead them. There are several reasons for this problem:
- URL is incorrect, because the web owner misspelled or mistyped it;
- A web page has been moved or renamed, but initial links have not been changed;
- Web pages have been deleted;
- Some parts of the page – images, videos, or files – have been deleted;
- The external website is not available, offline, or has permanently been moved to a different location;
- Interference from CSS, HTML, CMS, or JavaScript plugins have been broken;
- Geolocation restrictions or firewalls do not permit outside access.
Why Are Broken Links Harmful?
Links that lead your websites’ visitors nowhere are not merely annoying. They are harmful both to you and your users. For one thing, your visitors have a bad experience. They expect to land on the page containing the content they want to read. Instead, they are greeted with the 404 sign, which understandably causes frustration and might even discourage them from revisiting your website. For another, dead links undermine your SEO efforts. They devalue the level of equity that you have built into your website. As a result, your reputation on Google might suffer. It is, therefore, advisable to mend your broken links before they cause damage to you and your visitors.
How to Mend Broken Links?
You can identify broken links through Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Xenu Link Sleuth, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Once you have detected all your malfunctioning links, you need to apply yourself to fixing them. Depending on the number of your dead links, the mending process might take minutes or weeks. But because leaving them unrepaired will get you into trouble with your website’s visitors or Google, you cannot but have a shot at fixing your broken links. This is what you need to do to get them in order:
- Replace dead links with live ones: Identify all your broken links and then put new ones in their places.
- Remove broken links: Instead of replacing the links that lead visitors to a blind alley, you may simply delete them altogether, if, of course, their removal does not deprive your visitors of crucial information.
- Update every link leading to a moved internal page: for any deleted internal page, you need to delete every link leading to it from your website’s content.
- Make required corrections: if your link contains a typo or other errors, correct them.
- Make a 301 redirect: if your URL contains a typo, make a 301 redirect. The same applies to backlinks.
Always remember that broken links on your website or page are pernicious. They might damage your relationship with Google and your website’s visitors. You have to make a persistent effort to mend each of your dead links. This might not be the most exciting task but, once completed, it will prove rewarding.