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Broken links are an increasingly common issue that negatively impact the SEO performance of websites. This can happen for various reasons, such as deleting or changing page URLs without properly redirecting them.
Enhancing user experience is of utmost importance for digital marketers and website owners. Implementation of essential analytics tools can dramatically increase website performance and search engine rankings.
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), the successor to Google Search Console, offers trackable metrics that are essential for optimizing your site. This helpful platform allows you to monitor the health and performance of your site as well as submit XML sitemaps and manage security alerts.
As part of SEO best practice, it’s extremely important to ensure that broken links on your site don’t harm its SEO ranking. Here’s how you can keep track of them using different tools:
Google Webmaster Tools
Broken links are an SEO professional’s worst nightmare because they can hurt website rankings and create a poor user experience. Fortunately, Google Webmaster Tools offers a convenient way to find and fix these broken links.
Online Tools
Your online tools, like Broken Link Checker, Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Ahrefs can help you identify broken links on your website and manually update or remove them, or 301 redirect the old URL to the new one. Once found, these tools make identifying broken links much simpler.
Consider Context and Purpose
Before replacing a broken link, it is essential that you first consider its context and purpose – this increases the odds that web administrators will accept your request to replace it with a live link. A broken link could be caused by typo or URL structure errors; or alternatively it could have been deleted or relocated altogether – in such cases 301 redirect may suffice if relevant pages still remain relevant.
Screaming Frog
Broken links can have a negative effect on user satisfaction as well as SEO rankings. When visitors click a link that leads to a page but encounter an Error 404 message instead of arriving there directly, they are likely to leave immediately and go elsewhere; typically caused by either deleted pages or changes without redirects in place.
Regularly review your website for broken links and ensure all pages are functioning optimally, using tools such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth or Screaming Frog to identify and report on these problems. An effective method for fixing broken links is reaching out to webmasters of sites linking back to you and asking them to update the links with content from you. While this approach might take more time and effort than using crawling tools to manually audit for broken links on your site, this approach ensures quality backlinks. For insights on Webmaster Tools , click here or browse around this website.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs Site Explorer’s ‘Broken links’ report provides an effective means of detecting broken backlinks. A broken link refers to any link which has been deleted from a website or cannot be located due to a 404 error (page not found).
Fixing Broken Links
Fixing these broken links requires either:
- Redirecting them directly
- Rewriting their URL to point directly at a relevant page on your site
- Asking the website with which the broken link originated to fix it
Reaching out directly is also an effective way of building relationships among website owners while driving more traffic your way.
Importance of Fixing Broken Links
Fixing broken links is not the most critical SEO task, but should still be undertaken regularly to:
- Improve user experience
- Protect link equity from being lost due to dead pages
Furthermore, fixing broken links quickly may help recover from Google penalties so it’s worth your while ensuring any broken ones are rectified immediately.
SEMrush
Cracked links on your website can be an unmitigated disaster, diminishing user experience and damaging rankings. But this issue can easily be rectified; all it takes are the appropriate tools to identify and track them.
One of the best tools available to detect both internal and external broken links is Semrush, which allows you to do just that. Simply log into your account, enter your website URL into the search box, and once Semrush has finished crawling your website click “Issues.” From there you can check for broken links as well as identify their locations on each page of your website.
This information will allow you to prioritize broken links based on their impact on SEO, view metrics and status of each link (e.g. 404 or 500) so you can quickly understand its source and fix it efficiently.
