Broken links can easily damage the perception visitors have about your website. Besides the security record and visual design of your website, broken links can either make or break the trustworthiness and professionalism of your website. If you include links that fail to reach the intended destination or send visitors to a malware or phishing website, it will harm your image.
Moreover, search engines value the quality of the links included in the website. If your website has broken links, it would send the wrong signal to the search engine and would result in the lowering of your ranking. This post shares everything you should know about broken links.
What Is A Broken Link?
In the simplest of words, a broken link is a link that has been included in a website and it fails to reach the intended location. When you click on a broken link, it will show you a page that mentions a 500-error or 404-error, a wrong page, or redirect you to a completely irrelevant webpage. The broken link can be internal or external. If it is internal, it would be a wrong link to your webpage. As for an external broken link, it would lead to the wrong website.
What Causes A Broken Link?
Generally, the most common cause of a broken link is a restructured website or when the linked website does not establish redirects. Now, the resource that you have linked to might be available on the internet. However, the URL would have changed. If the owner fails to establish redirects for all previous links, the website link would be unable to load. There is also a possibility of the website that you have linked to going out of business or being owned by a different business or individual. There is also a possibility of users getting redirected to phishing or malware sites.
Why You Should Care About Broken Links?
If you do not know much about broken links, you might think link rot is something minor. However, it has serious consequences. It adversely affects how customers view your business and their user experience. When visitors click on a certain link expecting it to lead to one thing and if that does not happen and they end up viewing completely different content, they will simply stop viewing your website and will search for content elsewhere. Furthermore, visitors will remember their experience and would not suggest your site to anyone. Therefore, you need to take the matter seriously.
How to Find Broken Links?
If you are wondering how you will manually go through every link on your site, you have nothing to worry about as there are plenty of tools that scan through every link on the site to let you know which ones are malicious or incorrect. Then, you can simply replace those links with the right links.
Conclusion
Since your website can help you make a huge impact and boost sales, you need to avoid broken links. Make sure to regularly review all the links on your site using a tool and change those links.
