Check For Broken Links for Better SEO
When doing a site audit you should check for broken links. Webmaster so add this as part of their overall SEO processes. We all know how important link build is for SEO. Take the time to make sure you have a healthy link profile. By having a link audit to can keep track of the link that are not working. Having a lot of broken links pointing to your website can have a negative affect.
Broken links on a website can quickly turn from frustration to anger for anyone who has ever encountered one. As a webmaster, you could send the webmaster an email to flag the page as spam, but nothing will happen. You can look at it and not do anything, or send an email to the webmaster asking for the page to be blocked. It is best to fix broken links as soon as possible, using free tools such as http://www.webrecoder.net/ and tools like Ahrefs to do so. As websites are marked as broken, this will help build a database of potentially problematic content. Using broken link detection will help you avoid wasting your time and money on useless links.
Frequently, people ask how to detect broken links. The most common cause of broken links is human error or a problem with the web server. To start, you should check the documentation for the server on how to handle such issues. Generally, hosting companies offer this information in their Help sections or on their support forums.
Broken Link Types
Broken links fall into three categories. An example is when someone leaves an outdated link on a website. Although many people find this unwanted information, some find it useful when looking for duplicates. The second type of broken link occurs when someone pastes a page into their article without setting any links within the text itself. It is a very common mistake, but it can also be helpful when it comes to identifying links that are stale or low quality. Adding an origin tag to a blog post that has been pasted directly into the blog itself is a third type of broken link.
How do I check my broken links?
There are a lot of SEO tools out there. Each has its own use case and benefits, so it can be difficult to decide on which ones to get. Broken Link Checker is one of the most popular (and oldest) SEO tools available. It’s a free tool you can download from GitHub. It scans your website’s source code and checks for links that are no longer working or no longer pointing to the right pages. You can use it on your website, personal blog, or any other website that you’d like to check for link problems.
If you’re looking for a way to find out if a Link-Optimize tool is really worth using, or if you’ve found a cheaper option that does the same thing, this is a quick and easy way to check. Get the URL of the page you want to check, and open the Google Analytics (GA) Extension for Chrome or Safari. Click on the “More Tools” link near the top of the page and select the “Analyze link structure” option. From there, you can cross-reference the URL against both your site’s robots.txt file and the page structure Google considers acceptable for tracking pages with internal links.
How do I fix broken internal links?
If you have a website with lots of internal links, it can be difficult to tell how many times you’ve used a specific link. You could forget that you’ve previously searched for something and come back to it later with a fresh question. With a little practice, though, you’ll be able to spot typos. Furthermore, if you update your website frequently (weekly or monthly) then it’ll be much easier to tell when there’s a gap in the text that doesn’t seem right.
There are 4 ways to fix broken internal links:
- Did You Make A Typo? Broken internal links are often caused by typos
One of the first ways a broken link occurs is from typos. This also is one of the easiest ways to correct to problems. Many time is the simple solutions are needed. Make sure you check the spelling when link building, this will become a important practice in the future.
- Bring the page back to life. If there are links pointing to the missing page, then this is the most optimized way to resolve broken links.
Bring old broken links back is a great way to solve any broken link problem. This not only reactive the link you’ve build but you can get a boost to another piece of content. If you are looking to get a boost from new content changing out an out broken link with the new content is a great way of doing this.
- Redirect
By redirecting broken links to new pieces of content you can send link juice to new articles. This is a great way of getting a new piece of content to rank quicker. This also solves to broken link problem so it has a two fold effect.
- Delete the Broken Link
If you are creating tons of content you will come across the problem of broken links. Updating old content and having title changes will cause broken links. It is good practice to update your old content. However by doing this you may create a broken link. Sometime the best thing to do is just delete the link. Doing this can say you time and allow you to focus on creating new content.
How do you fix broken 404 errors?
As a webmaster, you’re responsible for the interactive experience your visitors have when they load your site. When a visitor encounters a problem or doesn’t find what they’re looking for, they should be directed to another location or page. If you don’t know where that page is or how to make it work, then reducing load time for other visitors is one of the easiest ways to help them succeed.
The simplest way to fix a 404 error on your site is to redirect users to a relevant page. Consider restoring the original page if there is still a lot of demand for the deleted page and there is no suitable redirection page. If a page is still driving traffic to your website with the keywords restore the page. Do not give up your hard earned traffic if you can bring the content back.
Do dead links hurt SEO?
On the surface, a broken link can seem like a minor issue. If you have a small website and can afford to rebuild the lost links (it’s not cheap), it’s not a big deal. However, as you grow and your traffic grows, fixing broken links could cost you SERP exposure and ranking. The bigger your site is, the more valuable your content pieces become and any errors in them will be noticed by search engines. The more errors, the higher chance that someone will miss them and come right to your site having read something different than what was originally displayed. The bigger your site gets the more often you want to check for broken links.
Broken links will not only affect search engine rankings, but can also hurt the link popularity of the pages they were once on. The solution is easy. A few years ago, Google started penalizing websites for duplicate content. If a page in your website has a broken link to another page in your website, search engines will flag the entire site as having duplicate content. To prevent penalization by search engines for duplicate content, you must update or remove any broken links on your website.
For the most part, it’s pretty easy to avoid duplicate content. Just be sure that when you link to your own site from your pages, the links are no longer active (i.e. links to dead pages). This helps with Search Engine Optimization. Don’t let a dead link get your website penalized. It can happen to anyone, but if you regularly check for live links, you’ll be able to catch fixes before they get out of hand. A great habit is to check For Broken Links every thirty days.
How do you prevent broken links?
How do you prevent broken links? You just test your links. If they work, great! If they don’t, fix them. I know it can be hard to tell when something is broken. Especially when it’s on a blog that you follow but if you follow the right people, you’ll know within 15 minutes whether or not something is valid.
One of the easiest ways to prevent broken links is to use short, simple, easy-to-read and easy-to-type URLs. Avoid using a lot of spaces between words when making links, especially if it’s a link to something via Google or one of the other search engines. You don’t want to waste precious real estate on a browser window when you could be using it to view content that could help you succeed in your business.
You’ve probably come across broken or missing links if you’re a WordPress user. If your business website is active, this can be a serious problem. Run a link checker to protect your website and save yourself a lot of frustration. It can help prevent access issues by checking the backlinks and telling you about any broken or missing links, so you can get on with posting content.