The Impact of Broken Links on SEO

Broken links are one aspect of SEO that often goes overlooked but can profoundly impact a website’s overall ranking. Whether due to a website redesign, content updates, or external links no longer working, broken links can lead to a frustrating user experience and harm a website’s credibility.

We will explore the impact of broken links on SEO and provide tips on mitigating their effects to ensure your website’s success in search engine rankings.

Do Broken Links Affect SEO?

To be clear, broken links are normal when browsing the internet. They are not so taboo that they should drive you into an insane panic when your website has some.

Even the largest websites have a good amount of broken links. Google understands this, too; hence, it doesn’t go about punishing every website with a broken link.

However, there are indirect consequences of broken links on your SEO strategy. And some of the most prominent are highlighted below:

1. Negative User Experience: When users click on broken links, they are directed to a “404 error” page, indicating that the page they were looking for is not found. This can be frustrating for users and may negatively impact user engagement on your website.
2. Crawling Issues: Because search engine crawlers use links to navigate and index your web pages, broken links might impede the crawling and indexing process, negatively impacting your rankings.
3. Wasted Link Juice: If a website has a broken link, the link’s potential to pass on link juice to the intended page is lost. This can affect SEO as search engines use link juice to determine the quality and relevance of a website’s pages.
4. Lower Domain Authority: The more broken links on your website, the less trustworthy it may appear to search engines. Search engines assume that websites with many broken links are not being maintained or updated and may be abandoned or neglected. The Eye10 Competitor Research tool allows you to check for your domain rating (by Ahrefs) and that of your referring domains. More so, you can compare this with the leaders in your industry to determine how your strategy holds up.

How to Check for Broken links

It is easy to check for broken links with the Eye10 Backlink Monitor tool. Once you have created a group with the list of links you want to check, the system will automatically generate a report about the status of the backlinks, including which ones lead to an error and which have been properly followed.

The screenshot below shows an example of how results are displayed.

Fixing Broken Links

Before discussing ways by which you can fix broken links, it is important to point out that not every broken link must be fixed. This might seem strange, but as pointed out earlier, broken links are a normal experience on the web, and search engines understand this too.

Depending on your website’s size, it might be inefficient to attempt to fix literally all the broken links you discover. Instead, focus on fixing high-value links that can boost your website’s UX and enhance your domain authority. That said, here are some steps you must take:

Check Spellings

Some links lead to a nonexistent page simply because the URL is incorrect. To fix these, you simply have to swap the incorrect URL for the correct one. Sometimes this can get tricky because just one missing character could be the oblivious issue.

So, you should always carefully confirm that you have the correct URL before taking further steps. If you want to check for a further range of structuring issues with your URL, then the content analysis section of the Eye10 On-Page SEO tool will help you achieve this, showing you various pieces of information.

301 Redirect

Sometimes, broken links occur because the content has moved to another URL on the website. For inbound links, whenever you move the content of a page to another page, always apply a 301 redirect on the previous page.

If you do so, anyone who follows that link will not be met with an error or a dead-end; instead, they are referred to the new page that shows the relevant content.

Contact Webmasters

You might notice that a 404 error is occurring because an external site links to your site incorrectly. This could be by using an incorrect URL or linking to a nonexistent page.

In certain cases, the best option would be to reach out to the site owner or the author and provide them with the correct link. They will likely be generous about this since a broken link affects their visitors’ user experience, and they want to avoid that.

Fixing Outbound Links

If you find out that your website links to an external source that is incorrect or nonexistent, you can either remove the links right away or make a replacement.

Of course, when you replace broken links, always adhere to the best standards by ensuring that the new source aligns with the content on your page. This will keep you in good standing for search engine rankings.

As a bonus, this section cannot be closed without pointing out that many links to your website are broken because you might have removed the content while other pages were linking to it. As such, you have been losing a lot of link juice that you would otherwise have retained.

To avoid future broken links and link juice wastage, if you no longer consider the content of a page relevant, always try to update the content first before you consider deleting the page.

Conclusion

Broken links may seem like a small issue, but their impact on a website’s SEO cannot be ignored. They can negatively affect user experience, crawlability, and authority. Regularly checking and fixing broken links can improve your SEO ranking, enhance user experience, and build trust with your audience.

SEO tools from Eye10, such as the Backlink Checker and the Backlink Monitor, will help you achieve this more effectively. With a single subscription, you can access all Eye10 SEO tools. Start enhancing your SEO strategy now.