Searching and then fixing broken SEO links is very crucial to building a better SEO strategy for the brand. It also ensures that the customer experience remains of top quality. In this article, I will be discussing what Broken Links are and other things related to them.
Keep reading till the end to find out more information on the same!
About Broken Links
It is a web page that can’t be accessed or found by a user for different reasons. When a user tries to access such a broken link, they get an error message displayed. These links are also called link rots or dead links.
Examples
Here is a list of some of the error codes that might get displayed:
- 400 Bad Request
- 404 Page Not Found
- Bad URL
- Bad Host
- Reset
- Empty
- Timeout
- Bad Code
Causes For Broken Links
There are a lot of different things which can cause broken links, and most of them are not intentional. Getting knowledge about the common causes of broken links can aid in remaining more aware of the things to look out for when working on SEO strategies.
Here is a list of the most common reasons why they happen:
Typo Errors
This is the most common human error that can happen when the words within a URL are wrongly spelled. When the link is spelled wrongly, that can make the server confused and it can’t tell where the link is trying to direct and displays an error page.
You need to make sure that you are effectively checking your URL spellings – which can ultimately help in avoiding the issue.
Links Were Moved
A few links do not redirect to a page but rather take the user to downloadable content like Google documents, eBooks, or PDFs. When these pieces of content get removed, but the links don’t – the link then has nowhere to go and returns an error.
Page Getting Deleted
If you are in possession of a valid link that goes to a page but then that linking page gets deleted, and the link does not have anywhere to direct to – it displays an error page.
This is a very common reason for the existence of many broken links. Hence, you need to make sure that you have a clear linking and redirecting strategy – after you delete a page.
Broken Code
The code in itself can also get broken. Like CSS, HTML, Javascript, or even other plugins.
When the code gets broken, it needs to be fixed and other links wouldn’t work and instead show errors. Hence, it becomes very important to keep a keen eye on code.
Page Getting Renamed
Very similar to typos, when the pages get renamed, the URL also changes, and without the new URL being updated in all the links – the server will not know how to process those requests and display an error page. When the page is renamed, you need to remember and make sure that the page is updated accordingly.
Name Change Of Domain
When the brand changes its domain name – which is a common occurrence that takes place during merges or rebrands – the domain then gets changed and oftentimes the internal links get forgotten amidst all of this.
Restructuring Of Website
When a website gets newly launched or restructured (but on the same domain) there can be a wide variety of issues that come up. The pages might get deleted and renamed and the content might get combined. This automatically means that the links to the pages of the old structure would not be able to get linked anymore and would require to be updated.
Ways To Find Broken Links
Now after you recognize the signs of a broken link on your website, you would want to get started at fixing them, as soon as possible. There are a lot of effective ways of searching for broken links on your website:
SEO Tools
As a brand, you might already have a tool that you utilize for SEO. These same tools have the option for creating a site audit. This is also going to help you in determining the broken links on your site. There are some SEO tools that can aid in determining the cause of a broken link. It can be really helpful in building up strategies.
Quality Assurance Testing
When a person combines old pages, moves domains, restructures the website, and adds new pages – it becomes very important for having a stage in that process for quality assurance. A great step to implement during that specific stage would be to check all of the links and to ensure that they are not already broken.
But, if they are then you have to plan to change the link or even redirect the users to the proper link so that there are no errors left.
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is known to use information that its bots have gathered for putting together a report which you can access. This will effectively help in the identification of any issues that the algorithm might have found and can also aid in determining if Google has taken note of noticing the broken links during its crawl.
This is only going to work for the URLs particular to your site, and not for any external links which you might have.
To Wrap It Up!
Finding up and then replacing the broken links is a very crucial part of keeping up with SEO and other things which can be done for optimizing a site.
That was all for information regarding what broken links are. Thank you for reading up till here. I hope you found the information useful.
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