The impact of broken links on website health is profound, yet often overlooked by site owners.
Broken links don’t lead anywhere, which makes them bad for user experience.
Plus, since they’re a dead end for search engine bots, their SEO impact isn’t good either.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll discuss:
- The basics of broken links
- Types of broken links and their SEO impact
- Broken link effects
- Finding and fixing broken links
Let’s dive in.
Types of Broken Links and Their SEO Impact
Broken links are hyperlinks on a web page that no longer point to an active web page.
When a user or search engine follows a broken link, they often land on a 404 page.
Importantly, a technically sound website doesn’t have any broken links. A broken link can be internal, external, or an image link. Let’s talk about each and their impact on SEO.
Internal Broken Links and Their SEO Impact
An internal broken link exists within your website. It starts from one page and ends on a different page on the same site.
Internal broken links can occur for multiple reasons. The most common ones would:
- A change in URL structure
- Deleted pages
- Typing/copying mistakes
Internal links are harmful specifically because they disrupt the flow of link equity, also known as “Link juice”. It’s a measure of authority that passes from one page to another through a hyperlink.
Broken internal links can also frustrate users as they try to navigate your site. This could lead to more visitors bouncing back without getting the information they came for.
Plus, these links can prevent search engines from effectively crawling your site and understanding its content and structure.
External Broken Links and Their Impact on Website Health
External links point from your site to a different site. But, when they’re broken, they land nowhere. Common causes include:
- The linked website removes the page: When the website you’ve linked to removes the web page without setting a redirect.
- URL changes on that site: A change in the URL structure of the linked website could break an external link if it’s not updated.
- Typos in external URLs: Typos and copying mistakes can be another reason for broken external links.
External broken links may not impact SEO and website performance as much as broken internal links. However, they still damage your website’s user experience and performance.
For one, they can lead to a bad user experience. Your visitors may not return to your site, causing an increase in the bounce rate.
Plus, broken links on a web page send negative quality signals to search engines. It shows that your content is poorly maintained or outdated.
All of that can easily lead to a drop in SEO performance.
Broken Image Links and Their Impact on Website Health
You can link an image to external or internal URLs. A broken image link occurs when this link leads to an error page (Most commonly a 404 page).
Common reasons include:
- An incorrect file path
- Moved or deleted image
Image broken link effects are almost the same as other broken links.
They cause the same negative impacts on SEO, leaving search engines and users with a dead-end.
Of course, leaving broken image links on a web page isn’t good for user experience either.
The Overall SEO Impact of Broken Links
We’ve talked about the negative impacts of different types of broken links. Let’s talk about common broken link effects on a website and why finding and fixing them is crucial.
Lower Search Engine Rankings
404 pages aren’t good for SEO. They act like dead-ends for search engine bots, affecting their ability to crawl and index your site.
Active links provide a path for these bots to crawl all areas of your website and understand its content. A hindrance in the form of a broken link breaks the flow, making indexation harder.
In addition, an increased bounce rate and a reduced dwell time as a result of broken links are user experience signals that can hurt your rankings.
Reduced Crawl Efficiency
Google has a limited crawl budget for every website. Too many broken links will waste its resources as it’ll try to access pages that no longer exist.
Broken links may also lead to indexation issues, even for critical pages of your site, negatively impacting your website’s health.
Decreased Page Authority
As previously mentioned, links (Particularly internal links) pass link juice or link equity from one page of your site to another.
The receiving page, as a result, gets an authority boost, helping its ranking power.
However, when a link gets broken, it leaves no possibility of authority transfer. In fact, it breaks the bond that keeps the two pages connected.
Finding Broken Links for Website Health
Now that you know the SEO impacts of broken links, let’s move on to a more practical part: Finding them on your site.
You need to find where they are and why they’re broken.
There’s no way to know whether broken links are the cause of a particular website health issue except an SEO link audit.
If your website is small, you can take the manual route, but why do that when you have automation tools available?
Now, there are several free and paid SEO tools you can use to find a list of broken links on your site.
Screaming Frog has both a free and paid plan. It crawls and audits up to 500 web pages for free.
You can use a browser extension like SEO Minion to identify broken links on a specific web page.
Install the extension, visit the web page you want to check, and click the extension icon at the top right.
The tool will start searching for broken links on that page. The links will be divided into different categories.
You can then click on each type of link in the report and find their location on the web page. Of course, clicking on a broken link should only lead to a dead-end.
Broken links can arise for several reasons, some of which you don’t have control over. So, if you want to keep your website free from negative broken link effects, run an SEO audit once in a while.
As soon as you find a broken link on any of your web pages, fix it before it causes any significant harm.
Fixing Broken Links for Website Health
Depending on the type of link and the underlying issue, there are several ways to fix broken links on a site.
Prioritize Fixes
Depending on the size of your website, you may be dealing with more than 100 broken links. You need to identify the most important links and fix them first.
You can check Google’s search quality guidelines to understand the impact of each type of broken link on user experience.
Eventually, you have to fix all broken links on your site, but it’s a good idea to start with the ones that can have the most impact.
Redirecting Broken Links
One of the most common ways to fix broken links is by setting a 301 redirect to correct or relevant pages.
If you’ve changed a page’s URL and can’t (Or don’t want to) change the links pointing to it, a 301 redirect would be the best option.
For instance, let’s say you have a blog post on “9 SEO Tips for New Websites” with the URL: www.yoursitename.com/9-SEO-tips-for-new-websites.
Down the line, you decide to add a few more tips. The new URL could be “www.yoursitename.com/SEO-tips-for-new-websites”.
Use a 301 redirect to make sure anyone clicking on the old link lands on the updated blog post URL.
301 is a permanent redirect that passes most of the link equity or juice to the redirected page. Plus, it ensures a smooth user experience and aids search engine bots in understanding the content.
Updating External Links
Your content, linked to high-quality external sources, gets a boost in authority and credibility. But, the same links can work against you if they get broken for any reason.
The good thing is that external links, when broken, are simple to replace. Most of the time, all you need to do is find a relevant alternative.
If there’s no suitable replacement, you have the option of removing the link.
Fixing Broken Image Links
Broken image links can occur for two reasons: Either the image file has been moved or it’s deleted.
In the first case, you want to update the file path. If it’s deleted, upload the image again (Or its replacement). Of course, you have the option to remove an image link as well.
Test and Validate
Once you’ve fixed all broken links on your website, run another audit to make sure you haven’t missed anything.
Again, links on your site can also arise for reasons that are out of your control. For instance, an external link could get broken if the linked site changes the URL.
Therefore, run a comprehensive SEO audit often to make sure there are no broken links on your site.
The SEO Impact of Broken Links: Conclusion
There are multiple negative broken link effects on a website’s SEO and user experience.
For one, a broken link leads search engine bots to a dead end, making it hard for them to effectively crawl and understand your website.
Plus, these links can have a negative impact on two important ranking signals: Bounce rate and dwell time (Time spent on site).
Clearly, the repercussions of having broken links on a website are too big to ignore. So, if you want your website to perform well in search, run an audit to find broken links and fix them.
Download