Broken Links and Search Engine:
Broken Links refers to those links that exist on a webpage and are clickable but returning with nothing like 404 (Not Found) or any other error. Broken Links are very dangerous and can hurt your website ranking very badly as well as destroy user experience.
Even, the broken links can also disturb your crawl budget and can cause indexing problems - So, it is always a good idea to regularly check broken links on your site and fix them accordingly. You can easily check broken links with ETTVI’s Free Broken Link Checker tool without any charges.
Here are some common reasons for broken links:
Broken links can be made by many reasons but here are some common causes of broken links:
- Changing URL structure
- The site may be temporarily unavailable or permanently shutdown.
- Giving link to external resource (Video,Image or PDF) that has been moved or deleted.
- Misspelled URL by site owner
- Firewall or another relevant software
- IP Blocked by external site owner
How to Fix Broken Links?
Finding broken links is just one step in improving SEO efforts as you also need to fix those to get improved ranking.
External Broken Links:
There is nothing much you can do about external links. So, there are only two ways that you can follow to fix external broken link:
Remove the URL
Replace with a Valid URL
Yes, these are the only ways to fix external links - You can just remove them or replace them with a new valid URL.
Internal Broken Links:
Remove the URL:
The first thing that you can try to fix the internal broken links is just remove the link from your webpage if it is not important.
Redirect the URL:
You can also redirect that URL to a working and relevant URL - You can use 301 redirect or 302 redirect according to your needs. 301 Redirect used for permanently redirecting like if you completely want to shift from your old URL to new one. 302 Redirect used for temporary redirecting like if you want to redirect for a short passage of time.
Replace the URL:
You can also just replace that error URL with a valid URL.
Typo Mistake:
Check if there is any typo mistake if it is then fix that typing mistake and you are good to go.