What Are Broken Links? And How Can You Find and Fix Them? Share: Maps Of Arabia Date Published 6 September 2022 Categories Blog Reading Time 4-Minute Read Broken links are web pages that a user cannot find or access for a variety of reasons. Web servers frequently show an error message when a user tries to visit a broken link. Broken links are also commonly referred to as “link rots” or dead links”. Let’s learn more about how to fix all issues related to broken links and how to cope with search engine optimization problems. Examples of Broken Links Let’s take some examples of broken link error codes and error codes that a web server may display for a broken link: 404 Page Not Found: The requested page or resource does not exist on the server. 400 Bad Request: The host server doesn’t recognize the URL on your page. Poor Host: Or invalid hostname; the server with that name doesn’t exist or cannot be reached. URL Error: Incorrect URL, such as a missing bracket, extra slashes, wrong protocol, etc. Incorrect Code: Invalid HTTP response code, when the server response is in violation of the HTTP specification. Empty: The host server responds with “empty” responses that contain no content and no response code. Timeout: HTTP requests were constantly timed out during the link check. Note: When the host server is reset, all connections are terminated. It’s either misconfigured or overcrowded. Causes of Broken Links Broken links can occur for a variety of reasons, including: The website owner typed in the wrong URL (misspelled, mistyped, etc). Your site’s URL structure recently switched (Permalinks) without a redirect, resulting in a 404 error. The external site is no longer accessible, is unavailable, or has been permanently relocated. Links to previously moved or deleted content (PDF, Google Doc, video, etc). Page elements that are broken (HTML, CSS, Javascript, or CMS plugin interference). Outside access is not permitted due to a firewall or geolocation restriction. Is it Important for SEO to Fix Broken Links? Broken links will affect your Google search results, but not your overall SEO. We even ran a test on Apple’s website, scanning 2000 URLs and receiving 9 failed responses. This does not imply that Apple will begin to lose ground; however, having too many broken links on a single page may indicate that a site has been neglected or abandoned. Broken links are used to determine the quality of a site by Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines, but as long as you’re currently monitoring for broken links or fixing broken links when Google notifies you of a new issue detected on your site (as in the example below), you should be able to maintain a high-quality site: 1. The User Experience Don’t overlook the impact of a dead link; the user experience is a significant factor that influences SEO. When search engine algorithms change, it is because the primary goal is to provide users with a better search and experience. Although search engines will understand that there will be some broken links, actual users may not be as forgiving. This will undoubtedly harm your reputation. 2. Bounce Rate Whether you have one or several broken links, each visitor to your page will base their decision on usability, experience, load time, and content. If there are broken links on your site and the visitors cannot access the information, they will move on to another site that can provide them with the information they require. The higher the bounce rate, the less time they spend on your site. How to Locate Broken Links on a Website The simplest and quickest way to determine if you have any broken links is to run your SEOptimer report and look for any broken links on that page: If your site has hundreds of pages or posts, you can use a tool like SEOptimer’s DIY SEO to crawl all of your pages to identify broken links- or you can download a plugin for your CMS platform that can check these. Google Search Console can also assist you in identifying any issues with your site after their bots have crawled it. They will notify you if a page on your website is broken. It is important to note that they only display URLs from your website and not external links. These errors can be found in your Google Search Console >> Crawl >> Crawl Errors. Keep in mind that crawl errors are prioritized; if the URLs aren’t important, the errors won’t affect your search results.