We have all experienced this at least once. You have been searching endlessly online for a particular product and just when you think you have found what you are looking for, you click on the link and immediately get taken to a dead end. This is commonly called a 404 error or also called a broken link. Show
What Is a Broken Link?A broken link is a link on a website that no longer works because the website is experiencing one or more of the following issues:
Though Google tells us that 404 errors may not hurt your SEO, the broken links could hurt your user’s experience on your website and cause higher bounce rates. We will show you how to Detect, Avoid, and Fix those annoying 404 errors on your site so that you may keep your visitors on your site longer and more engaged. How to Detect Broken LinksThere are many plugins and software available that allow you to search for 404 errors and broken links. Some of them have been found to be unreliable as they tend to be a CPU hog and slow down your website and even your computer. Rank Math is one of our favourite WordPress plugins and has a built-in broken link detector. An alternative method we recommend for detecting broken links on your website is through the use of Google Search Console. To perform this simple task you should:
How to Avoid Broken Links on Your WebsiteYou can avoid and prevent unwanted 404 error messages. Instead of deleting pages with old information, consider refreshing and updating your content. How to Fix Broken LinksOne of the most common and easiest methods of correcting broken links on your website is by way of creating 301 Redirects through a plugin like Rank Math or by updating your htaccess file. Adding a 301 Redirect to htaccessThe syntax for creating the 301 redirect will look like the below: Redirect 301 /landing-page-2 https://www.yourdomain.com/landing-page-1
Updating The 301 Redirects via HTAccessEditing the HT Access File can be simple but may also be very dangerous if you are not familiar with the process. We do want to give the warning that one missing character could crash your entire website. It is highly recommended that you copy the entire file and paste it into notepad so that you have a backup in case you break your website.
Broken Links From External SourcesSometimes you may receive a broken link error due to an external source improperly linking back to you with an incorrect URL. To correct this, it is recommended that you reach out to the author or webmaster and request an update to the incorrect URL. Correcting broken links on your site can go a long way in improving your website’s SEO, provide a greater user experience, and improve the performance of your site. But it can also be very overwhelming and confusing. We can help. Contact our Digital Marketing Strategists from our Raleigh, NC or Boston, MA locations at 919-341-8901 or Schedule a Complimentary Consultation and Website Review Today. About The Author:Christopher LaraChristopher Lara is the Boston Branch Manager at TheeDigital. He specializes in partnering with business leaders in Massachusetts to provide them with solutions to establishing a winning online presence. Give Christopher a call at 617-915-4477 to talk about web design, SEO, and digital marketing that will meet your needs. Read more by Christopher Lara Head of Content @ Ahrefs (or, in plain English, I'm the guy responsible for ensuring that every blog post we publish is EPIC). Article stats
Shows how many different websites are linking to this piece of content. As a general rule, the more websites link to you, the higher you rank in Google. Shows estimated monthly search traffic to this article according to Ahrefs data. The actual search traffic (as reported in Google Analytics) is usually 3-5 times bigger. The number of times this article was shared on Twitter. Share this article Subscribe for weekly updates Email Subscription Subscribe Leave this field empty if you're human:Contents Do you want to reclaim “link juice” and improve user experience? Then it’s time to find and fix your site’s broken links and broken backlinks. Doing this will almost certainly have a positive impact on your rankings. But it’s important to note that broken links and backlinks are two entirely different problems. As such, I’ve divided this post into two sections:
Both of these fixes will help to reclaim so-called “link juice” across your site and improve user experience.
Let’s rock! New to link building? Check out our Beginner’s guide to link building 1. How to find and fix broken links on your websiteBroken links are those on your site that point to non-existent resources—these can be either internal (i.e., to other pages on your domain) or external (i.e., to pages on other domains.) This is what a broken internal link looks like: (It goes from one page on ahrefs.com to another—yet the page it points to doesn’t exist.) …And this is what a broken external link looks like: (It goes from a page on ahrefs.com to a non-existent page on another domain.) Here are the only two ways that broken (dead) links can end up on your website:
Some people say that broken outgoing links (both internal and external) effectively waste “link juice”—this is due to the way Google’s PageRank algorithm works. Some people also say that they hinder your websites crawlability. (For more information on the issue of “do 404’s hurt my site?”, check out this article from Google.) But technicalities aside, one thing is for sure: broken outgoing links (both internal and external) lead to a poor user experience. You should, therefore, make every effort to fix them—it’s easy, I promise! Step #1: Finding ALL broken links on your siteFor small websites, you can use Site Explorer to find all broken external links. (It will pick up most, if not all, of the broken external links for smaller websites.) Site Explorer -> yourdomain.com -> Outgoing links -> Broken links. Sidenote. You can view this report for any site, it doesn’t have to be a site that you own. Check out our guide to broken link building to see how this can be used to build new backlinks to your site.But for larger websites, it’s better to use Site Audit; this will perform a live crawl of your website and thus, will ensure that you don’t miss any broken links. To see broken external links (with Site Audit): Site Audit -> Project -> External Pages -> HTTP status codes -> 4XX. But what about broken internal links? (e.g., yourdomain.com/page -> yourdomain.com/broken-page) You will need Site Audit for this, too. To see broken internal links (with Site Audit): Site Audit -> Project -> Internal Pages -> HTTP status codes -> 4XX. Sidenote. Ahrefs isn’t the only tool you can use to find broken links on your site. You can also check the crawl errors in Google Search Console, use crawling tools like Xenu’s Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or if WordPress powers your website, you can install a Broken Link Checker plugin.Step #2: Fixing ALL broken links on your siteIn all honesty, this is quite an easy task—it’s just super-boring! Here are the two possible fixes:
As I said, this is a pretty mundane task, so it may be worth hiring a VA to do this for you. They are ten a penny on UpWork. (Seriously, this beats doing it yourself!) 2. How to find and fix broken backlinks to your websiteBroken backlinks are broken inbound links from other websites to your site. This is what a broken backlink looks like: (It goes from a page on urlprofiler.com to a page on ahrefs.com—i.e., our website.) Because the page on our site no longer exists, it returns a 404 error. Here are the two most common reasons for broken (dead) backlinks to your website:
Want to see an example of the latter? I was checking and fixing broken backlinks on this very blog, and found this link: Looks fine, right? Here’s what happened when I clicked it: This seemed strange because I knew that the correct URL for Site Explorer is, in fact: https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer So I decided to delve into the HTML:
Do you see the problem? The closing bracket is included before the closing </a> tag—this is wrong! It’s an easy mistake (that was no fault of our own), but it still results in a 404. Regardless of why they occur, broken backlinks are bad because they effectively waste “link juice.” It just sort of evaporates—or perhaps, spills—when it hits the 404. But I know what you might be thinking…
NOPE. Google has said that they don’t have any kind of authority score metric based on the overall backlink profile of a given domain. Therefore, these links (as they are) provide no benefit for you. Sidenote. It is true that broken links still contribute to your Domain Rating (DR). But remember, this is an Ahrefs metric that merely shows the strength of a target website’s total backlink profile (regarding its size and quality)—that’s all! By the way, you can check your website’s Domain Rating here.Here’s how to find and fix broken backlinks: Step #1: Finding ALL broken backlinks to your siteFor this, I’ll use Ahrefs’ Broken Link Checker. Let me show you some examples using one of my favorite websites, zenhabits.net. Site Explorer -> yourdomain.com -> Pages -> Best by Links -> add a “404 not found” HTTP response filter. This report lets you quickly sort all the URLs that return a 404 code on your site by their URL Rating (UR), number of backlinks, or ref. domains count. By default, these links are ordered by URL Rating (UR). Personally, I prefer sorting by the number of linking domains (i.e., RDs)—this way, we’re starting with the URLs that have the most broken links pointing to them. Do that for zenhabits.com, and you’ll see that one of the broken pages has 80 referring domains! (That’s a lot of wasted “link juice!”) Use the Broken Backlinks report to see all broken backlinks to all pages in a single view If you’re already familiar with Ahrefs, you may be aware that we have a dedicated Broken backlinks report in Site Explorer. This report is useful if you’d like to prioritize your broken backlinks by the Domain Rating (DR) or the URL Rating (UR) of the referring page. But for the most part, I recommend sticking with the 404 filter in the Best by Links report—it’s much easier to prioritize that way. 🙂 Step #2: Fixing ALL broken backlinks to your siteIt goes without saying that you have no control over the links outside your website. Or do you? 😉 Here are five fixes for broken backlinks:
But which solution should you use? Well, I recommend going through these in the order that they’re listed. By that, I mean that if option #1 (i.e., reaching out and requesting a fix) isn’t appropriate, move on to option #2, then #3, and so forth. Make sense? Let’s use this broken page from zenhabits.com example to illustrate this process: Looking at the URL, it’s clear that there are no formatting issues (option #1). So there’s no need to reach out to anyone as the mistake is on our end, not theirs. So let’s move on, and try to figure out what this page was before it was moved/removed. In this instance, we can get a rough sense of what this page was about by looking at the URL. But it doesn’t give us the full picture. So let’s use the Wayback Machine to see an archived copy of this page. It looks like the article was about the “beginner’s mind” attitude to life. Quick tip: what to do if the Wayback Machine fails You’ll sometimes find that The Wayback Machine hasn’t archived the desired page. No worries; Ahrefs to the rescue. Site Explorer -> enter the broken URL -> Backlinks. Now, look at the anchor text and surrounding text for each link. This will almost always give some insight into what the page was about. If you’re still unsure, try reading some of the articles that link to the broken page—these can often provide even more context. Now that we know what the page was, the first step is to check whether the page was deleted or moved. To do this, search in Google for: If this search finds the broken page (at a different URL), then you can simply redirect the old, dead page to the new URL using a 301 redirect. (Check out this guide from Yoast for more information on how to do that.) As announced by Gary Illyes from Google, 301 redirects do pass PageRank.
But if no results are found (as is the case here), then chances are that page was deleted. At this point, if you simply wanted to replace or recreate the page, you could—this would fix all broken links as the URL would no longer lead to a missing page. However, nine times out of ten, you will have deleted the page for a reason, so you probably won’t want to do this. Thus, the next step is to check to see if you have any similar content on the site, then redirect. Here’s a Google search for that: Bingo! If I managed this website, I could set up a 301 redirect from the old, broken page to point the other 80 referring domains to the live page. You can do that for nearly every broken backlink on your site. Just keep two important things in mind:
But what if there is nothing relevant to which you can redirect the broken page? What then? To be honest, sometimes it’s perfectly fine to ignore the broken backlink; just make sure it shows an informative 404 page. And never use “soft” 404s. Here’s an extract from the Google Webmaster Central Blog that explains why:
Sidenote. Google also classes the bulk redirection of any unknown or broken pages to your homepage as undesirable “soft” 404’s, so this is yet another reason to avoid doing this.Final thoughtsBroken links and backlinks not only waste “link equity,” but also contribute to a poor user experience. That’s why you should make every effort to find and fix them. But this isn’t a one-time task; detecting and fixing broken links and backlinks must be an ongoing process, as a part of your sites’ regular SEO Audits. (Don’t forget that you can schedule automated audits in Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool, which makes it easy to keep on top of broken links and backlinks!) What’s your experience with fixing broken links and backlinks? Let me know in the comments section below. 🙂 How useful was this post? 3.8 Submit RatingVote count: 5 No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post. Keep Learning301 Redirects for SEO: Everything You Need to KnowLearn what 301 redirects are, how they affect SEO, how to implement them, and most importantly, how to use them to boost organic traffic. Link Reclamation: How to Easily Find (and Reclaim) Lost BacklinksLink reclamation is the process of reclaiming lost links. You had a link. You lost it. You want it back. Learn how to do that in this guide. 9 Easy Link Building Strategies (That Anyone Can Use)Are you struggling to build backlinks to your website? Try these 9 easy (yet effective) link building strategies today. Google Search Operators: The Complete List (42 Advanced Operators)Do you want to know how to leverage Google for your SEO needs? Check out this list of 42 Google advanced search operators, plus 15 actionable ways to use them to accomplish specific SEO tasks. How to Find Who Links to Your Website (and What to Do Next)Do you want to know who links to yours or a competitor’s website? Learn how to do that in this straightforward guide. What causes a broken link?Links may be broken for a variety of reasons, including the URL being mistyped, the webpage no longer being online, the page's URL having changed, or the linked page having restricted access (such as by being behind a password or firewall).
What does it mean when it says link is broken?A broken link is a link on a website that no longer works because the website is experiencing one or more of the following issues: The destination web page has been moved or no longer exists. An invalid URL has been entered for the link by the web page owner. The linked web page exists but can't be accessed by a user.
How do I find a broken link?Table of Contents. Crawl The Website.. Click The 'Response Codes' tab & 'Client Error (4XX)' Filter To View Broken Links.. View The Source Of The Broken Links By Clicking The 'Inlinks' Tab.. Use The 'Bulk Export > Response Codes > Client Error (4XX) Inlinks' Export.. Crawling A List Of URLs For Broken Links.. What happens when you click a broken link?If you click a broken link, you'll see a 404 page error or similar message explaining the webpage is not available.
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