Are broken links a problem on your website? In this broadcast, we’ll talk about why broken links are a problem you want to fix, how to figure out if your site has broken links, and how to fix them.
When my colleague asked me to look at the website and social media of a prospective client, she mentioned offhand that one of the links to their social media was wrong.
This made me wonder: I wonder what other links are wrong on this website if whoever linked the Facebook icon linked it to a page that doesn’t exist anymore. It turns out outbound links weren’t the problem but major websites linking TO this prospective client were getting to error pages since they had moved the link to their online store.
Some vocab we can get out of the way:
inbound links = links coming into your website
outbound links = links going out of your website
More inbound links are better…. but they are not all created equally.
One more vocab word we need to describe this:
DA/Domain Authority/DR= general score given to a website based on its age, reputation, inbound links, etc.
In other words, one link from newyorktimes.com is worth more to me (probably) than 100 links from brand new websites.
So what we want as website owners is
a) a lot of inbound links
b) from a bunch of different domains who…
c) all have good authority
Here we used ahrefs.com as our broken link checker but the results may differ if you use a different tool. Just use the same tool every time to see progress.
Remember, broken inbound links send visitors to your 404 error page as their welcome. Not very welcoming.
You can track broken links with the ahrefs.com tool or a WordPress plugin like Redirection on your website can track them as they happen.
You can also make a redirect (AKA fix a broken inbound link to your website) on your server directly.
Making the redirect on your site (as the website owner) is much easier than asking someone to ‘fix it’ on their site. Because if they were nice enough to link to you, you can be nice enough to make sure it works.
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