logo
logo
Sign in

How Broken Links Affect SEO and Ways to Check for Them?

avatar
James ToddSmith

Using a broken link checker, you can find broken links on your website and fix them correctly. Make your customers' experience better by fixing these broken links on your website.

When people click on links to or from your website, they expect to see certain things on the home page. Broken links are annoying for users and can hurt your site's relationship with Google, which is called its search engine optimization. (SEO).


Most broken links happen because website redesigns change the URLs over time. Links are a big part of your site's SEO, so it's important to check for broken links and fix them.

How to Check for Broken Links

1. Check Internal Links

The easiest way to find broken links on your website is to use a crawler and look at its HTML code. There are many crawlers that aren't hard to get.

Once you start the crawler, it will look through your site and give you a report on the pages it finds. If your page crawler finds broken links, you'll have to fix them.

2. Check and change links from search engines.

Check and replace links from search engines. Search engines can find broken links and use a redirect to send people to the right place.

Go to Search Appearance on Google's Search Console, then click on the Crawl tab. Enter the URL of the page you want to check, and then click "Submit." Search Console will send you a report with all of the links found on the page, along with information about whether the links are external or internal and whether they are broken or not.

"Error 404" Pages

When a person clicks on a broken link, they will see a 404 error page. The 404 error page is a normal web page with a message that says the page the visitor is looking for doesn't exist. Different 404 error pages can be changed to fit your brand and include your contact details.

How to Look for 404 Pages?

Google Search Console can help you find your 404 pages. Go to the tab called "Crawl" and then type in the URL. Next, click on Preview to see the page's URL and title, and then click on Crawl.

The Search Console sends back a list of all the 404 pages that it found. This includes the words on the page, the links, and the state.

What are the ways to avoid and fix 404 error pages?

1. Update Rather Than Remove Content

2. 301 Redirect Visitors to a New Page

3. Eliminate the Dead-End Page


Read More: How Broken Links Affect SEO and Ways to Check for Them?

collect
0
avatar
James ToddSmith
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more