Fix broken links of your website and improve your SEO ranking

Broken links are one of the most annoying things when it comes to good customer experience on a website – you don’t want to put your customers off and you don’t want to damage your SEO rankings so checking broken links needs to be part of your routine website maintenance.

Now imagine this is happening to people who visit your site. What do you think they’ll do next? We’ll tell you: they’ll most likely hit the back button, which means you’ve just lost a potential customer. And who knows how many more before that?

When visitors follow links to or from your site, they are expecting certain content to be available to them once they get to that page. Broken links are not only bad for user experience but can also be harmful to your site’s loving relationship with Google, i.e., your SEO. Avoid linking out to broken content, and also avoid having pages on your site that are broken.

Fortunately, you can fix them and, in this article, we’ll show you how. We’ll start by explaining what broken links are and what causes them, then move on to how to find and fix them so your visitors never hit that back button again (at least not because of a broken link).

Why and how do broken links harm your website?

A broken link may not seem so bad on the surface. But the truth is it can do some serious damage to your website, your reputation and your business. It can hurt your search engine rankings and your site’s user experience, and it can also result in lost customers and revenue.

Here’s how:

1.   User’s experience on your site

If your site is a chaotic mess of broken links that prevents users from accessing the information they need or from completing a task, don’t be surprised if they move on to the next site that actually works. And it’s probably going to be one of your competitors.

2.    Your reputation and revenue

No matter how much time and resources you’ve invested into getting potential customers to your site, if what they find is a broken site, all of your efforts will have been wasted. How can they trust to hand over their information or credit card details to an unreliable site that doesn’t even work? Trust takes time to build, but only a moment to lose.

3.    Your SEO efforts

While Google has stated that simply having a broken link or two on your site won’t affect your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), the impact shows in other ways.

Here’s how:

When crawlers run into a broken link, they will waste time crawling the link to verify it is broken so it can be categorised as such. This wastes crawl budget which could have been used on pages that are ok, harming the chances of those pages ranking well on in search results. (And of course, a broken link won’t pass on the SEO value that a normal link pass.)

But that’s not all. Usually, when visitors land on a broken page, they leave within seconds. By spending less time on your site, search engine algorithms will assume it’s because you aren’t providing visitors with high-quality content or information that’s relevant to their search. This, of course, results in lower rankings.

Now that you know how much damage broken links can do to your online business, let’s look at how you can fix them.

How do I fix a broken outbound link?

Once you have identified all of the broken links you need to take action – either by removing them or replacing them with more relevant content, so that all of the broken links are effectively repaired, making your website a source of valuable content once more.

It’s important to realize that checking and repairing broken links, particularly external ones, is an ongoing job as pages move and change all the time – you should be looking at these issues on a regular basis to keep your website working well.

What about broken pages within my own website?

It’s not just outbound links that can be broken – you might have error pages appearing within your own site too. Error pages appear when content on your website has been deleted or moved without redirecting the page properly.

You can find error pages (otherwise known as 404 pages) within your own site by using the tools outlined above. Once you have identified all the issues, you’ll then need to fix them.

There are two key ways to either fix, or avoid generating 404 pages:

1)    Update content instead of removing it

If you have a page which is out of date, simply update the content within it to bring it back up to date, rather than deleting it. If you delete it, visitor searching for the URL of that page will see an error page, which is not good.

2)    Use a 301 redirect to point visitors to a new page

If you do delete a page from your website then you need to go in and redirect that URL to the new page using a 301 redirect. That way, if anyone clicks onto the deleted page, they won’t see an error page, they will be automatically taken to the new page.

Link Building Service That Actually Works! With GVT

Google’s search rankings depend highly upon the links and the content. If you are one of those who have content as powerful as the competitors but are lagging far behind in the search results, you are surely in need of some serious link building. Now, when we say SERIOUS link building, we mean RIGHT links built for RESULTS.

“We, at Global Vision Technology, have a team of seasoned experts who acquire hand-picked links for you manually. We help you to connect with real blogs and establish real business connections. “

We plan, create and collaborate to deliver custom link building campaigns that perform exceptionally well. Our plan is to create high quality, do-follow backlinks for your website, which results in improved SEO performance.

We target industry-relevant websites owned by real bloggers who we can trust to promote your content effectively. When we find the relevant ones, we reach out to them with the aim to increase your online presence.

Hopefully these tips have helped you to understand the real benefits of checking and updating your links regularly.  If you have any questions or need any help or advice, feel free to give us a call (+91 – 8104014442) or contact us now.

Conclusion

You can’t ignore broken links, considering the serious damage they can do to your site, your reputation, and your revenue. Now that you have the information and tools you need to check, find and fix broken links, don’t wait to address them. Do it now (and periodically after that) because each day that a broken link sits on your website is another day you’re losing out.

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