Broken URLs Are Bad For SEO

As a qualified Ottawa SEO company we conduct a thorough analysis of your website to find all links that are broken and fix them in various ways here is why.

Have you ever been on let’s say a social media platform and while going through your feed, you notice an article about something you are interested in: You click the link to the full article only to find out that the link you clicked on leads to a page that no longer exists. I dunno about you but it kinda rubs me the wrong way, in our industry we have a term for that link it’s called a link rot.

Why Should you care about broken links?

When visitors follow from or to your website they are expecting the content to be available to them once they get to that page. Usually, visitors will just leave your site since broken links are not only bad for UX but can also be harmful to your site’s loving relationship with Google, i.e. your SEO. The less time a visitor stays on your site, the less likely the search engines will assume your website is not providing what the user is looking for thus giving you a lower ranking.

Google and other search engines regularly send bots to crawl your website, they travel link to link and collects data about each page on your site. If you have a lot of link rot the bots will have a hard time following the content of your page thus giving them a lesser score.

What types of links can be found on your site?

There are two types of broken links on your website and they can be divided into two categories: internal links and external links

Internal Links:

This type refers to a link that goes from one page of your site to another page of the same site. These are the links you have the most control on since you can decide exactly where to send them and what anchor text (the text that represents the link) to use.

External Links:

This type refers to a link on your site that points to an outside source that is used as a reference. Those links are harder to control since the linking source is not your website. Regular checks on your site are necessary to make sure that the places your website are linking to still exist.

How do we find and fix broken links?

At Web Search Guide we run your website through a broken link checker tool that will analyze both types of link.

Internal links are easier to fix if we find some we will work with you to determine if:

1-The page in question really needs that link

2-If the referred page that the link is going to can be re-created or if the URL has changed at some point

3-If we can’t find the content that was on the page we will consult archive.org which pretty much is the internet archive database in some sort and most likely had a version of that page archived.

If the broken links are external, we either replace them with a new destination source or contact the page owner and let them that their link is broken and need to fix it.

At the end of the day this can become a long process and has to be done on a few times a year just to make sure your website is running smooth and the search engine bots can navigate through your website smoothly.