Broken Links

Broken links are no fun!  The visitors are sent to a 404 page, which can be frustrating and could cause you to lose business over time.  In this article, by experts at leading SEO company in Mumbai will tell you what a broken link is, how to find them on your website, and how to fix them!  So let’s get started.   What are broken links? A website comprises many different pages, each with its unique URL (uniform resource locator). When you click on one of these links, the browser requests the page from the server and displays it on your screen. The same process happens when you type in a URL directly into your browser’s address bar or open an email attachment. As experts in SEO digital marketing will tell you that if any part of this process fails, it results in a broken link. For example, if you click on a link that does not exist anymore because it has been deleted or moved elsewhere on the site or no longer exists, it’s considered a broken link. The most common reason for this is when someone deletes an article, page, or post from their website.  Another common reason is when a webmaster decides to change the URL structure of their site without redirecting old URLs to new ones. For example, let’s say you have a blog post about “How to make roasted red peppers,” and it has a URL like this: https://www.example.com/blog/how-to-make-roasted-red-peppers/.  If you decide one day to change your blog post titles from singular words to plural words, then all your URLs will break except those that have been redirected (via 301 redirects). You would then need to update each URL to reflect the new title with an s at the end (https://www.example.com/blog/how-to-make-roasted-reds-peppers/). The link is broken on the web page you are linking to. This can be tricky as you may have hundreds or thousands of links on your site or in other places, such as social media accounts and publications where you have referenced the old URL.   Types of broken links There are three types of broken links: Redirected Links  Redirected links are often caused by a change in the URL structure of a website. When you create a website, you can choose how the pages are organized and whether they will have their unique address or if they will be accessed through the main index page. For example, if you have a blog with multiple posts, each post may have its own unique URL that includes information about what post it is and its content. Suppose you decide to change the structure of your website and re-organize your blog posts into categories with subcategories. When visitors click on old URLs for your posts, they will be redirected to the new URLs for those categories instead. This is called redirection because it directs users from one place (the old URL) to another (the new URL).   Broken Internal Links  These occur when an internal reference within your own website has changed and no longer works correctly. For example, if you have an old blog post with a reference in its text pointing to another resource, such as an image or video file, then updating that text without updating those references will cause them to break when someone clicks on them. As experts from one of the best Seo company in Mumbai will tell you that this can happen for many reasons, including updates made by other team members, upgrades done by developers, or simply because someone forgot about them altogether!   Broken External Links  External links are generally those that point outside of your own website to another resource, such as a news article, product page, or social media profile. These are the most common link types that get broken due to changes made by others (either intentionally or accidentally). For example, if you link to a product on another site and change its URL structure, all the links pointing to its product pages will stop working unless they update those URLs.   Broken Links and SEO Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use web crawlers to scan the internet for new and updated content. When a crawler encounters a web page with links to other pages, it follows those links to find more content. If one of these links is broken, the crawler will not follow it and will therefore be unable to index the page in question. Broken links can harm your SEO strategy because they cause your site’s authority score to drop. This means that search engines may rank you lower in their listings than you deserve. In addition, broken links can be frustrating for visitors who click on them only to end up at an error page or another site altogether.   How to find broken links Finding broken links is an important part of site maintenance. It’s good for your SEO, and it helps visitors find what they’re looking for. But finding broken links can be difficult, especially if you have a large website with thousands or even millions of pages. Use a broken link checker. This is the fastest way to find all of the dead links on your site. A broken link checker will crawl your site and look for any URLs that don’t have a corresponding file on your server (or a 404 error). It’s important to note that this only works if your site has been crawled and indexed by Google, Bing, and Yahoo. There are many tools to find broken links on your website. It is important to fix these broken links because they can cause a serious loss of traffic, leads, and sales.   Here are some of the most popular tools for finding broken links: Google Search Console This is the most comprehensive way to find broken links on your website. Google Search Console is free for all websites registered with it, and it provides data about how users interact