Having broken links on your site can be a major SEO issue. This is the case because users do not to repeatedly click on links that lead them to dead sites. Moreover, search engines frown upon sites that have many broken links. However, it is common for sites to have such links. In some cases, websites can have even hundreds of broken sites. If you consider the adverse effect of such sites on your website, you will appreciate the need for you to fix them. Here is a brief explanation on how you can fix broken links on your website as part of the SEO work that you do on the site. The good news is that you can use a free SERP rank tracker
to carry out this process.
Why do you need to fix broken links?
The presence of broken links on your site hurts your ranking. Search algorithms usually crawl sites to test whether all the links work correctly. If your site has many broken links, then the rank algorithm may end up giving it a low score. Such low SEO scores commonly undermine your overall online marketing activities.
Additionally, broken links usually affect the overall quality of your site. When visitors to your site get broken links, they miss the information that they need. Besides, people tend to rate sites with broken links lower than those which have all links functioning correctly.
How can you fix broken links?
The first step of fixing broken on your site is finding them. You can do this by relying on any good SEO analysis tool that is available. For example, you can use Google Analytics to find all the broken links on your site. When using this console, you can navigate to the tab that is marked, ‘Not Found.’ Here, you will get the number of all broken links on your site.
The second step of the process involves finding the specific causes for the broken links. Some links may be broken because you reconfigured your pages. In some cases, others may have wrong spellings. It is necessary to identify the specific causes of all the broken links on your site as part of the process of fixing them.
Third, you need to work through the broken links one at a time. At this stage, you should deliberately fix the main cause of the broken link. If uses cannot find specific pages on your site because of the way you changed its URLs and general configuration, then you must fix this. Also, if some of your links are broken because of typing errors, you can fix by identifying and correcting the typos.
Fourth, you should fix all the errors related to redirects at this stage. In most cases, you address redirects on your site by using either the Apache HTTP or Microsoft IIS. You will have to take some time and create pages for every broken link to address the redirect related problem.
The last stage of the process of fixing broken links in SEO is to redirect all the links. You can carry out this step by making a few changes to the settings that are related to redirected links. Once you select the option that is titled, ‘301 Redirected Permanently,’ you will have entirely fixed all broken links on your site.
In conclusion, having broken links on your site is a disadvantage because it lowers the rank of the website. Moreover, visitors do not like to click on links that lead them to non-existent pages. You can address the problem by first making a detailed report of all broken links. You can then work through the list by addressing the specific causes of every broken link. In the end, you need to redirect all the fixed links and test them repeatedly to ensure that they work correctly.