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Broken links are bad for quality assurance, as you should know by now. Broken links can wreak havoc on your conversion rates. Broken links harm SEO indirectly by affecting bounce rate, time on site, and how link juice is passed. Broken links can also have a direct impact on SEO rankings by signaling that your website is old and out of date. So, how do you go about repairing broken links? With just one broken link having the potential to harm your online presence, checking for broken links on your site is critical.
Broken links are those that are unable to redirect the user to a new location. Aren’t we all aware of what links are? They are typically colored differently and underlined to indicate a clickable element, and when clicked, will take the reader to a new location, whether that is a new page on your site, a connected website such as an eCommerce store, or an external website. When a user is unable to access or locate a webpage, the link is considered broken and will frequently redirect a reader to an error message rather than the page that they are attempting to access.
A broken link is also known as a dead link or link rot. It is perfectly normal for any website to have broken outgoing links and broken backlinks. The Internet is dynamic, with pages and entire websites being deleted on a regular basis. Having too many broken outgoing links, on the other hand, can result in a poor user experience for your visitors. Furthermore, it is a waste of your crawl budget because 404 pages are a “dead end” for search engine crawlers. Broken backlinks are another opportunity lost. Backlinks to 404 pages on your website could instead pass value and authority (link equity) to live relevant pages on your website, increasing their chances of ranking.
Ways to Fix Broken Links on Website
Web-Based SEO Audit Tool
The first method we recommend is to use a web-based SEO audit tool to find and repair broken links. Ahrefs and SEMrush are two of the most popular. Both include extremely powerful site audit tools that allow you to automatically scan your site for errors.
Find Broken Links with the Ahrefs Audit Tool
The first method for locating broken links in Ahrefs is to use their fantastic Site audit tool. Simply create a new project, enter your website’s address, and let it scan it. This could take up to 20 minutes, depending on the size of your site. Remember that if you’re a Kinsta customer, requests from the user-agent AhrefsBot are not billable visits.
Find Broken Links with Ahrefs Site Explorer
Broken links can also be found using the Ahrefs Site Explorer. Simply enter your site URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer, navigate to the “Backlinks” report, and click “Broken” to see your website’s strongest broken backlinks. You can also go to the “Best by links” report and use the “404 not found” filter in “HTTP codes.”
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a helpful tool from Google that helps you “monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results”. To begin, you must first verify your site with Google Search Console. Then you can start using its features, such as broken link detection. Google Search Console includes a Crawl Errors report that allows you to see all the pages that returned a 404 error to Google: Clicking on any of those links will open a popup that will show you which pages link to that 404 error page, allowing you to fix the broken link on those pages:
Desktop Software
In addition to web-based SEO audit tools, desktop software can be used to detect broken links. Screaming Frog, a well-known SEO tool that is free to use to find broken links, is the most popular option here. Screaming Frog is compatible with Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. Here’s how to use the programme to find broken links after you’ve downloaded and installed it.
To begin, enter your website’s URL in the box at the top and click Start: Then, using the Response Codes option, you can filter out 404 pages before using the IN links feature at the bottom to find links to those 404 pages: Integrity is another good desktop SEO tool for Mac users that can be used to find broken links.
Online Broken Link Checker Tool
If your site isn’t too large, you might be able to find broken links using a free online broken link checker tool. BrokenLinkCheck.com, which allows you to check up to 3,000 pages for free, is a good option here. It’s also very simple to use; simply go to the website, enter your URL, and click Find broken links. Then you can choose whether to report specific broken links or all occurrences – reporting all occurrences is more thorough but may take longer
Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin
We do not recommend using a plugin to check broken links if you have a WordPress site because they can be a significant performance drain. From a performance standpoint, it’s far better to delegate these tasks to a separate tool using any of the methods listed above.
If you must use a plugin to check for broken links, do not leave it active and running at all times. Instead, run the plugin once and then remove it from your site once the broken links have been fixed. However, we recommend that you use one of the other tools instead of the plugins. The most popular broken link checker plugin is the free Broken Link Checker plugin from WordPress.org.
Reasons for broken links
Final Words
That’s it with our article on How to Fix Broken Links on Website A broken link is a web page that a user cannot find or access for a variety of reasons. When a user attempts to access a broken link, web servers frequently return an error message. Broken links are also commonly referred to as “dead links” or “link rots.” Broken links will affect your Google Search results, but not your overall SEO. We even ran a test on Apple’s website, scanning 2000 URLs and receiving 9 failed responses. This does not imply that Apple will begin to lose ground; however, having too many broken links on a single page may indicate that a site has been neglected or abandoned.