Broken links are bad for visitors because they give the impression that your site is not well maintained. Not only that, they’re also bad for SEO because search engine bots will stop from crawling all your pages if they meet a broken link.
A link is considered as broken link if the web server response with a 404 status which is a common error defined by the industry standard. Search engines have changed a lot these few years. One of the changes is it will consider user experience during the evaluation of the web page ranking in the result page. Link validity is included as one of the important factor in user experience design.
Google specifically advises webmasters to check for broken links in its web design guidelines. In particular Google has been very vocal about wanting to provide quality pages to its end users. A broken link is equivalent to a dead end. One or two of these issues is not going to drop you off the first page of the search results. However, long term publishing of broken links can degrade the overall quality of your web page and reduce search engine rankings both in your visitors eyes and the search engines.
Furthermore, broken links can reduce the chances of getting listed in the DMOZ directory and Yahoo! Directory and will likely discourage other webmasters from linking to you. Both of these will affect your search engine rankings as well.
2 Types of Broken Links
In general, I have categorized broken links into 2 types, external broken links and internal broken links.
External Broken Links
It’s nearly impossible not to have external links pointing from your website to other websites. It’s a good practice to refer your visitors to resources outside your website. Since those resources are out of your control, it is very likely that other webmasters remove the web page you are linking to. In this case, I categorize it as external broken link because the destination page you are linking to is no longer exist.
The solution for external broken links is easy. You can either remove the entire link from your web page or find a link to replace existing broken link.
Internal Broken Links
Internal broken links are referring to those non-working links reside in your web pages pointing to other web pages within your website. This can happen if you’re changing the name of a web page which is equivalent to changing URL. You can create a 301 redirect to guide the visitors or search engines to a new URL if they reach your web page using old URL.
Another scenario is you delete an web page permanently from your website due to various reasons. In this case, you need to remove all the linkings pointing to the deleted web page. If you don’t do it, search engines will think that you’re linking to a non-existence web page which is a bad experience for readers.
Check Broken Links Automatically
When you site is continuously growing or you already has a big site, then it’s nearly impossible to check all the links manually. If you’re using WordPress, then you’re lucky because you can simply install Broken Links Checker.
Broken Links Checker will scan through your whole WordPress blog to look for broken link. If there is a broken link, it will display the link in your dashboard which you can view it easily and take appropriate action.
Provide 301 Redirect To New URL
I would like to share with you another useful plugin for WordPress which is Redirection. It provides an easy feature for you to redirect from an old URL to new URL without touching any server configuration files.
Conclusion
Broken links are bad for readers as they break the user experience. Not only that, they also stop the search engines bots from crawling your web page and eventually it will affect your search engine rankings. To prevent such issue to happen, you can check for broken link in your website periodically.
Related Posts:
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along.A very good information. Thanks for sharing. I like this topic as I am also interested anything related to computer, internet and software. Keep on posting.
Regard
@Din29,
Great to hear that you are interested in anything related to computer. I hope you enjoy my future topic and post and do come back frequently,
Beyluen,
I am sorry this reply is not posted to the correct post of yours. I had trouble finding it again. But, it was on “Good things about domain names not matching content” exactly. Something like that. I just hoped to thank you. I was almost in tears this a.m. because I jumped the gun “buying” a domain name. I realized only after, that it might hinder me being as successful. Your post made me realize how to “work that for my benefit” or, how it can work for a person’s benefit.
Hope you see this one day, many thanks, Denise in Sams Valley Oregon:)
@Denise,
You’re welcome. I hope you have a great success. FYI, the page is at here:
http://www.bloghighlight.com/benefits-of-not-having-exact-match-domain-name/
Good work 4 good post please keep up…
thank you for the link, I will “now” bookmark it so I don’t lose it:) Im sure other’s will appreciate your comments as well, denise:)
Broken links can be a huge problem especially if they get indexed by a search engine. I wrote an article a while back about removing 404-error pages from google’s index, should you have a link to a page that doesn’t exist anymore but was indexed by Google.
Great article Bey Luen! Keep up the good work!
i have a few of them i off to go back and create back the same link again