A broken link is a web page that is the user is unable to find or access for various reasons. An error message is returned to the user by the web server when you access a broken link. The other name for the broken link is a dead link or link rot.
Know more about broken links as here below are some examples of the error codes that may present your error codes for a dead link.
• 404 Pages Not Found: The error appears when the page or resource doesn’t exist with the server.
• 400 Bad Request: In case if the host server is unable to understand the URL available on the page.
• Bad host: It is the invalid hostname in case the server is not accessible or available
• Bad URL: It is a malformed URL that contains a missing bracket, extra slashes, wrong protocol, etc.
• Bad Code: It gives Invalid HTTP response code as the server violates HTTP specifications.
• Empty: It is the condition when the host server returns an empty response with no content or code.
• Timeout: HTTP Request link check during the given timeout
• Reset: It is not configured or busy leads host server to drops connections.
There are various reasons that can lead to a broken link. It can be due to the reasons mentioned as follows:
• In case you have entered incorrect URL either misspelled or mistyped.
• It can cause 404 errors in case of URL structure of your site recently changed without a redirect.
• The site is no longer available either it has been offline or has been permanently moved.
• In case of links moved or deleted to content.
• It can also be due to the broken elements in page (HTML, CSS, Javascript, or CMS plugins interference).
• If you don’t get outside access due to firewall or geolocation restriction.
Broken links will affect your Google search results, but doesn’t impact your overall SEO. It affects the quality of the site, ranking as it increases the bounce rate. But it doesn’t mean that you will start losing your ranks. For example, Apple site scanned 2000 URLs with 9 failed responses. That doesn’t mean Apple will start losing its ranks but it can be either neglected or abandoned. Google notifies you a new issue detected on your site.
You should not ignore the impact of the dead link as it can affect the user experience. It matters a lot for SEO ranking. The search engine algorithms change; it is the main goal for better search and a good experience for users. The search engines can understand broken link but your user won’t be forgiving and it can reduce your reputation.
It doesn’t matter if you have one or more broken links, each visitor will make decisions on bases of usability, experience, load time, and content. If a link exists on your site, visitors won’t be able to access the information and they will move back to other sites to get the information they require. The minimum time spends on your site, higher is the bounce rate.
The simplest, easiest, and fastest way to find if your site has broken links. You can make use of SEO timer report and check the broken link on the page. If you have hundreds of pages or posts on your site you can make use of simple tools like SEO timer’s DIY SEO, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and more to crawl all of your pages to analyze broken links or download a plugin for your CMS platform.
Google Search Console helps to identify the issue with your site after bots have crawl your site. In case a website is broken, it will notify you. They will only show URLs on your website, not the external links.
You can find these errors in your Google Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Errors:
• If your URLs are not important it will not affect your search results.
• The report will show how important are the broken links.
• These pages will only affect your current search results
Similar actions can also be performed by using other SEO tools to detect broken links on your site.
How to resolve broken links issues on your website?
On the basis of your content weekly, you should check them regularly to keep your site ranking.
• Check Google Crawl Errors
• Avoid deep links in the website unless (or until) it is important.
• If the problem is with the external link, you should approach the linking website and you can request a fix.
• You can also make use of redirection mechanisms
• You can either recreate or replace the content at a broken URL.
• Redirect your broken page to the relevant page on your site.
If you are unable to resolve link issues then you can get assistance from Web Media InfoTech in Zirakpur. Feel free to ask your queries not only about SEO, web development, website design, digital marketing, reputation management, application development, and website maintenance.