Broken links: how to avoid them and why

by Web Digital Media Group Web Digital Media Group

What are broken links and how to fix them

A website that has internal links to pages that no longer exist (broken links) can for this reason:

· Losing part of the customer base. Current users redirected to non-existent pages will sooner or later get quite frustrated and never come back.

· Generate problems with the acquisition of new customers. A cause of incorrect hyperlinks people do not find things and pages that try and to which your site has addressed.

· Damaging your online reputation. Most online shoppers consider broken links as proof of website unreliability.

· In addition, broken links have a negative impact on the ratings of your website with the main search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc ...

Differences between internal and external links

With the growth of the internet and its content, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the relationships between individual pages and keep track of hyperlinks within a website.

There are no automatic tools or services that can enforce the correct relationship between websites, keep track of content, update the relationships between individual web pages.

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With the passage of time, some hyperlinks become obsolete stale or simply dead . These links no longer lead to valid resources. Visitors receive 404 error code which means page not found .

As far as internal links are concerned, this situation is more controllable because the problem can arise when we change the URL , the web address of an existing page on our site.

To overcome this problem, it is necessary to remember to implement the appropriate redirection operations of the web pages. Be very careful on this point, especially if you are migrating a website from one address to another this to not find yourself with dozens of pages with the error code 404.

With outgoing links or external links the situation is even worse: the website you are connecting to can change the name and position of its pages at any time without notice.

The page can be deleted, servers disabled (temporarily or forever) or their domains expire or are sold. Unfortunately you can't have any control over these things so the only remedy is to regularly run tests by probing every single output reference to make sure it's still alive and working.

How to identify broken links

It is really difficult to identify which internal and external links are broken. And it's even more difficult to fix them because for cleaning you need to know the precise location of the broken link tag in the HTML code.

Most online tools that audit web pages have the option to test for broken and no longer functional links. For example Semsrush offers this type of service below the link.

The software runs tests to check the 'health' of your website and, among other things, gives you the opportunity to check for any internal or external broken links. If your site uses WordPress as a CMS, I can recommend the use of a plugin called Broken Link Checker which, once installed, will provide constant updates and reports on any broken links present. You can download this plugin from this link. The last solution that I propose is to entrust this task to professionals. Webdigitalmediagroup can optimize your website and improve traffic from search engines. Contact us for a site audit and a free, no-obligation quote with Digital marketing services.