What steps can be taken to identify and resolve broken links on a website and how does resolving these help increase ranking of a website in SERP?
Broken links, also known as dead links or 404 errors, are hyperlinks on a website that point to pages that no longer exist. These can be internal links (linking to other pages within your site) or external links (linking to other websites). Broken links provide a poor user experience and can negatively impact your website’s SEO because search engine bots may perceive your site as low quality. Identifying and resolving broken links on your website is an essential maintenance task to improve overall site quality and search ranking. It enhances user experience, improves crawlability, and also helps with maintaining link equity.
Here are steps you can take to identify and resolve broken links on your website:
1. Use Free Online Tools to Identify Broken Links: Several free online tools can help you identify broken links on your website. These tools crawl your website and identify any links that return a 404 error. Some free tools you can use are: Google Search Console, Broken Link Checker by Ahrefs, and Dr. Link Check. Google Search Console has a "Coverage" report under the "Index" section, that will show crawl errors, including 404 errors. This shows you all the pages that are not found by the Google crawlers. Broken Link Checker will scan your website and provide a detailed report of all the broken links, internal and external. Dr. Link Check can also scan your site and identify any links that are not functioning properly, providing more detailed information about them. Using these free tools, you can easily identify the broken links on your website.
2. Manual Review and Testing: While automated tools are very useful, you should also manually check your most important pages and navigation to see if there are any links that are not functioning properly. Navigate through the site and click on various internal and external links to see if they work as expected. You may find some links not working or pages missing that may not always be reported by automated tools. You might also find links to resources that are no longer valid. A manual testing helps supplement the tools, so that all broken links are identified.
3. Categorize and Prioritize Broken Links: When you find broken links, it is best to categorize them based on their importance. If a major page that is linked from your homepage is a broken link, it should be addressed as a priority. If the broken link is an obscure page, which is not an important part of your site, it should be considered as a lower priority. If it is an external link that is no longer functioning, you can see if there is an alternative website that you can link to or you can simply unlink it from your website. By categorizing and prioritizing your broken links, you will focus on those that have a bigger impact on user experience and SEO.
4. Fix the Broken Links: Once you identify and prioritize the broken links, you can fix them by implementing one of these solutions:
Replace the Link: If the link is an internal link, find the correct URL and update the link. This is the ideal fix for most broken links.
Redirect the Link: If the content has moved to a new URL, use a 301 redirect to send users and search engines to the new URL. This helps to preserve any link equity you may have gained from the old url.
Remove the Link: If the content is no longer relevant, or if you are unable to find a suitable replacement, remove the link. It is best to remove the link rather than linking to something that doesn’t work or lead to a page with a 404 error. If a lot of old and outdated links exist, the overall quality of the website will reduce.
5. Regularly Monitor and Maintain: Broken link fixing is an ongoing process because websites change and resources become unavailable, and new broken links may appear over time. Therefore, you should always regularly monitor your website for broken links. Use the same tools mentioned above on a regular basis to see if any new links have broken. It should be a part of the website maintenance process. You should make sure that your website is always free of errors, broken links and other technical issues.
How Resolving Broken Links Increases Ranking in SERP:
1. Improved User Experience: Broken links can create a bad user experience by disrupting the user's navigation and flow, causing users to abandon your site, and increases bounce rate. By fixing broken links, you are making your site easier to use and this makes user happy, which is a strong signal to search engines. Search engines always give importance to websites that provide a positive user experience, and fixing broken links improves this metric. For example, imagine a user is on a website about travel and they click on a link to a specific page about hiking boots. If that page is broken, it disrupts their overall experience. Fixing these links make sure that users are able to navigate the website easily.
2. Improved Crawlability: Broken links make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl and index your site effectively. It makes the bots go to dead ends which is a waste of resources and reduces the overall quality of your website. When the search engine bot finds a broken link, it slows down its crawling and the indexing of that website. By fixing all the broken links, you ensure the bots can navigate through your entire site, discovering all the pages. This results in more pages being crawled and indexed, which has a positive impact on search results ranking. If your website has many broken internal links, it makes it harder for the search engines to fully explore all parts of your website. By fixing them, the search engines can index all relevant parts of your website.
3. Retain Link Equity: If you have links pointing to pages that return a 404 error, you're losing the value of those links because search engines are unable to crawl those pages. Resolving broken links, specifically by replacing them or using 301 redirects, makes sure that your valuable link equity from other sites is retained, and this is important for SEO. Internal links also help with distributing link equity throughout your website, so by maintaining the internal linking strategy, and fixing broken links, you can improve SEO ranking. For example, a blog post about web security might have backlinks to several reputable sites about cybersecurity, if one of those external sites removes their page, the backlink on your page becomes a broken link. Fixing the link by replacing it with a valid one helps retain all the valuable link equity that was pointing to the original page.
In summary, identifying and resolving broken links is a critical aspect of website maintenance and SEO. By using free tools, manual reviews, fixing them and regularly monitoring the website, you can ensure that the website is free of technical issues and provides a better user experience. This increases search ranking, because it is an important aspect of SEO and greatly improves crawlability and user engagement. By making sure that both internal and external broken links are resolved you are creating a better more trustworthy, and valuable website.