If you’re managing your own business website, you’ll be doing what you can to optimise the experience for both your website users, and for search engines. Of the many factors impacting SEO, links in to your website is one of the most important. There are numerous resources pointing to the importance of backlinks on your website from Search Engine Journal, Backlinko, and SEM Rush. Those articles will point to the importance of backlinks as being a key ranking signal that a web page and a web domain is a high authority, trusted site to visit. If the web page has a high number of links in to it, it must be worthwhile for others to see. Therefore, it gets some priority in search engine results.
However, as website evolve and develop and pages and structures change, those website links can break. Both website visitors and search engines hate broken links. Broken links break the natural path from A to B. It’s like hitting a dead end. Search engines will penalise websites with broken links, so it is best to avoid them. But how can you analyse whether you have broken links?
3 Top tools for analysing broken web links
All three tools do a similar job of analysing your broken links. You’ll be able to dig in to the source code and find which pages the links are appearing on. That gives you the knowledge to then put some fixes in place.
What to do about broken links
Usually, a broken link occurs because of a typo. So firstly, check the text and the link and make the changes as appropriate. If the web link no longer exists, it is probably best to set up a redirect, or simply remove the link altogether. The easiest way to set up a redirect on your website from the broken link to a relevant web page that isn’t broken is to use a tool called Redirection, assuming you use WordPress.
Redirection will help you route any traffic from one particular link to a new source destination. Your other choice is just to remove the web link. Simple as that!
If you have any questions about broken web links or website maintenance, give our team shout on 01604 419776.
