Broken links are URLs on a website that lead to non-existent pages. They are also called dead links or 404 errors. When a user clicks on a broken link, they are taken to a page that no longer exists or that returns an error message.
First, backlinks from other websites represent an opportunity for you. It requires strategy, but in the end, they can generate more traffic to your website and strengthen its authority. Second, it requires that you continuously maintain your own website to detect broken links since you don’t want them to exist on your site.
By continuously checking your website, you ensure that you don’t have any broken links. Make this a routine that you do weekly or monthly, depending on how many pages your website has.
When a user clicks on a broken link and ends up on a boring 404 page, it can negatively impact their experience of the website. They may get frustrated and leave the site, which can increase the bounce rate and decrease the time spent on the website.
When search engine bots encounter broken links, they can’t always crawl and index the entire website. This can harm the site’s SEO and prevent it from ranking high in search results.
When a broken link exists on a page, it loses the link value, or link juice, that would have been passed to other pages. This can harm the overall authority and ranking potential of your website.
If the page the link points to still exists, you can update the link so it points to the correct page.
If the page no longer exists, you can redirect the link to a new page. This ensures that both users and search engines reach a relevant page on your website.
If the page is no longer relevant or useful, you can remove the link entirely. This helps improve the overall quality of the website and prevents broken links from appearing in the future.
Learning to build links is a strategy aimed at increasing your domain’s credibility and driving traffic to your website. There are several benefits to link building, and the strategy doesn’t need to be extensive or require a full-time job.
By having several high-quality links or backlinks pointing to your site, you create conditions for being seen as an expert in your industry. Expertise or credibility is, as mentioned earlier in this guide, one of the factors that influence Google’s algorithm and help you rank higher in the SERPs.
To build a strong and high-quality presence, digital marketing is about more than just SEO. By working with link building, you expose your business to a larger audience and thus build brand awareness.
The right type of links can be challenging to acquire, but the effort can be worthwhile for better rankings. When you secure good links to your site, it can help you rank in search engines like Google.
Before starting, you need to have a plan for which pages you want to rank. Also, look at which pages your competitors are ahead with. From that, you can identify possible links to build and content to create.
Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that allows website owners to monitor their site’s performance in search results. The tool also includes a feature for finding broken links.
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that includes a broken link checker. It allows you to find broken links on your site, analyze your backlink profile, and track progress over time.
Screaming Frog is a website crawler tool that lets you find broken links on your site. It can also be used for other SEO tasks such as analyzing metadata and checking for duplicate content.
Replacing other websites’ broken links with yours isn’t difficult. What you need to do is contact the websites with these broken links and ask if they’d like to replace them with your link.
Although it’s relatively simple in practice to find and replace broken links, the process isn’t always straightforward in reality. See the example below:
You contact a website where you found broken links and write the following email to them:
Hi!
I liked your article/blog/news about X, very interesting!
I noticed that in the article/blog/news, the link to [URL] doesn’t work
I recently wrote my own [URL]. Feel free to link to it if that page is still relevant to you.
All the best!
Regards
If a company is actively working with SEO, they’ll probably have no objection to your offer. However, sometimes you may need to be ready to argue why they should link to your page instead of updating their own. Even if you don’t get a link, you might open doors to something else, like digital PR.
To actively work on SEO for your website, you can use off-page tactics such as fixing broken links and building links. By fixing broken links on your site and building links elsewhere, you increase your domain authority, work with digital PR, and create opportunities to climb higher on Google.
This is a time-consuming and long-term method, so include it in your ongoing work since it can yield strong results.