There’s something uniquely upsetting about clicking a link that you expect holds the answers to all your questions only to see:
404 Not Found
It’s an odd mix of disappointment and sheer frustration, and it’s what your visitors feel every time they click on one of your broken links.
The fact is no website is immune to its links breaking, and it’s a phenomenon that occurs quite often and for a wide variety of reasons (as we’ll soon explore).
Thus, knowing how to fix broken links is a must-have skill for any website owner or digital marketer.
Besides the negative impact on your reputation, broken links are also terrible for your SEO, so you have every incentive to hunt them down and fix them on a regular basis.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to find, fix, and forget about those pesky broken links on your site, so stay tuned to learn more.
What are Broken Links?
A broken link is a hyperlink that no longer points to its original destination.
Instead, it directs users to an error page, such as the infamous 404 Not Found. While it’s by far the most common, there are many other 4xx client error status codes that can affect your hyperlinks, such as:
- 410 Gone. 404 Not Found means that a web page is missing but may return someday, but 410 Gone means the web page is gone forever.
- 403 Forbidden. This error code appears whenever a client doesn’t have the necessary authorization to access the content.
- 400 Bad Request. If you see this error code, it means the server got confused over invalid syntax, such as a misplaced dash or semicolon.
Tons of other 4xx status codes exist besides these, but they’re the most common, and they can all negatively impact your SEO.
Also, there are three types of broken links that can occur on your website, which are:
- Broken internal links
- Broken external links
- Broken backlinks
Each type requires a unique fix, which we’ll explore in a bit.
For now, it’s important to know that you need to check each link type when conducting an audit.
If you fail to fix your broken internal links, for example, you will see negative impacts on your SEO and user experience, even if all your external links and backlinks work perfectly.
What causes links on your website to break?
You’re probably wondering why links break in the first place, or why you’d need to do more than one link audit.
After all, after you fix a broken link, won’t it stay fixed forever?
Sadly, the answer is no due to the variety of ways links can break. The phenomenon is so common that website owners coined the term link rot to describe it.
Internal and external links can break because of:
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- Misspelling URLs. This is an extremely common cause for broken links because there are tons of ways to mess up URLs. Whether you forgot to include http://, added an extra space, or misspelled one of the words, they will all cause the link to break. For a hyperlink to work properly, it has to be formatted perfectly every single time.
- Site migrations. If you migrate your site to a new CMS or hosting service, some web pages can get lost in the fray if you aren’t careful.
- Plugin or HTML/Javascript errors. Sometimes malfunctions with plugins or web code can cause links to break.
- Deleted pages. Failing to add a 301 redirect when deleting a page will cause every hyperlink pointing at it to break.
- Updated URLs. Let’s say you find a misspelled URL and correct it. Well, if you don’t edit every link that has the old URL (or add a redirect), all those links will break.
This is by no means a definitive list of every reason why links break, but these are extremely prevalent.
They’re so common that it’s become a best practice for every website to perform regular link audits to keep their broken links at bay.
Broken backlinks
Links on your website aren’t the only ones that can break, though.
Remember those backlinks that you worked so hard to obtain?
They’re also perfectly capable of breaking.
To make matters worse, any positive impact they had on your search rankings breaks with them.
Common reasons for broken backlinks include:
- A competitor took your spot. Website owners receive backlink requests on a daily basis, and not all of them are for brand-new placements. If one of your backlinks disappears, it could be because a competitor A) had a better resource or B) had more valuable content. This caused the site owner to remove your link and replace it with theirs, which is a pretty common practice (and is the underlying concept behind the popular skyscraper technique).
- Typo in the URL. Sometimes backlinks break (or never properly appear) because the site owner makes a typo when entering the URL. These types of broken backlinks are pretty easy to fix because all you have to do is reach out to the site owner with the correct URL.
- Moved content, site migrations, and updated URLs. Just as the links on your website can break to these issues, so too can your backlinks on other sites.
As you can probably tell by now, broken links can appear at any time and for a ton of different reasons.
But are they really a big deal? Will your entire website collapse if you ignore a few broken links?
If you count losing your search rankings as your website collapsing (which we definitely would), then yes! Next, let’s look at all the ways broken links can directly and indirectly affect your performance on search engines.
How Do Broken Links Impact SEO?
Broken links, if left unchecked, can cause a lot of harm to your SEO and user experience.
First, Google favors websites that are accurate, well-maintained, and frequently updated, and its algorithm reflects this in its search rankings.
Broken backlinks are a clear-cut sign of poor website maintenance, which won’t work out in your favor in the search results. Moreover, if you really let broken links pile up, it could cause Google’s algorithm to conclude that you’ve abandoned your website, which will make your rankings drop even lower (or disappear).
Here’s a look at the other ways broken links will negatively impact your SEO:
Bad user experience metrics
Google has a whole host of user experience ranking factors it considers, such as your bounce rate and dwell times.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of users that ‘bounce’ (leave your site) before clicking through to another page.
If your site is riddled with broken links, users will click away as soon as they see a dreaded error page, which will cause your bounce rate to skyrocket. Dwell time, which refers to how long users stay engaged on your site, will also see negative impacts.
Bad user experience metrics will translate to poor search rankings, so beware.
Decreased crawlability
One of the worst side effects of broken links is they cut back on your crawlability.
What’s that?
For websites to appear in Google’s search results, they must be indexed first, and the act of crawling is how new pages show up in Google’s index.
Crawler bots are programs that must first understand the content and structure of a website before indexing it.
This means crawler bots will use your URL structure and internal links to understand the greater context of your website as a whole. If your site has broken links everywhere, it’ll become impossible for crawlers to completely index your website.
As a result, some of your most important pages (like landing pages, lead magnets, and blog content) may get lost in the fray and won’t appear in the search results at all.
That’s the SEO equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot!
Missed link equity (link juice)
One of the coolest things about the way links work on search engines is that link equity is a thing.
Also called link juice (don’t say it three times in a row), link equity refers to the value and authority of a backlink.
It stems from the fact that Google treats backlinks as endorsements of your content’s quality.
For example, if a major website like Forbes links out to your content, it’s a strong sign that you’re publishing accurate, engaging, high-quality content. Trusted websites like Forbes don’t link out to just anyone (their reputation is on the line, after all), which is why high-quality backlinks hold so much power.
Well, the link equity you acquire from powerful backlinks doesn’t have to stay on one page. Let’s say one of your blogs did land a backlink from Forbes, and you decide to add an internal link to one of your other pages on it.
In this scenario, some of the link equity (you can think of it as ranking power) will pass over to the other page you linked to.
This means you can pass around the link equity you gain from valuable backlinks to other web pages, providing a widespread positive impact.
What happens if one of your equitable backlinks suddenly breaks?
You guessed it, all that link equity vanishes in an instant. Not only will the rankings for the original page drop but so will every page that benefited from its link equity.
Reduced trust
It takes a lot of time, effort, and consistency to build a loyal customer base that trusts your brand. At the same time, it doesn’t take much time or effort at all to lose them.
Essentially, leaving broken links on your site just isn’t a good look.
If your loyal fans (or newcomers) start seeing broken link after broken link, they’ll start to lose trust in your business. Should the issue only continue to get worse, they may end their relationship with your brand in favor of a competitor.
Search engines won’t view you favorably either, as broken links make your site appear neglected and unreliable.
How to Discover and Fix Your Broken Links
By now, it should be clear that you should enact a no-tolerance policy toward broken links.
While it’s virtually impossible to rid your site of broken links, remaining vigilant will reduce or completely negate their negative impact.
You should make a habit of regularly auditing your links and fixing broken links you find on the spot.
Before you can do any of that, though, you need to know how to uncover your broken links, which is what we’re about to teach you.
For the purposes of this article, we’re going to stick with using Ahrefs to find broken links, but there are plenty of other methods. For example, Google Search Console provides a quick and free way to check for broken links on your website.
Very quickly, here’s how to do it:
- Log in to GSC and select your property.
- Select Coverage on the left-hand sidebar.
- On the Coverage report, scroll down to the Details section to view any error codes that popped up.
- Keep an eye out for 404 status codes to find your broken links.
We prefer using Ahrefs because of the variety of tools and filters they have which greatly speeds up the process, and you can check for broken links and backlinks in one location.
How to find broken external links using Ahrefs
First, let’s learn how to quickly identify any broken external links on your website using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer feature.
Enter your domain into the tool and hit the Search button.
This will take you to your website’s general SEO Overview, but this isn’t the page we want. On the left-hand sidebar, navigate to Outgoing Links and select Broken links.
This will bring up the Broken links report, which will list all the broken external links on your website.
From here, all you have to do is go through each link and either A) remove it or B) replace it with an alternative link.
The report also tells you the specific error that it ran into when trying to follow each hyperlink, such as ‘404 not found’ or ‘cannot resolve host.’
Remember, it’s important not to forget about your broken external links because they will negatively impact your user experience.
If the resources you link out to don’t work, your users may get the impression that you don’t regularly update your posts – so be sure to clean up your external links.
How to find broken internal links using Ahrefs
Okay, that covers external links, but what about internal links?
For those, you’ll need to use the Site Audit tool instead of Site Explorer.
Once there, select your website under Project. If you haven’t already run a site audit on your website, you’ll need to set one up now. This guide from Ahrefs has some great info on how to use the tool.
After you’ve selected your website, navigate to Internal Pages under Reports.
This will take you to a page overviewing the internal pages on your website, including the presence of any broken links.
You can click on the number under Broken to view a more detailed report about your broken internal links, which looks like this:
As you can see, the tool will tell you which error code shows up for the broken link, which will help you fix it.
How to fix all broken internal and external links
Once you’ve identified all the broken links on your site, the hard part is done. All that’s left is to go through and fix each link, which actually isn’t too difficult.
Essentially, there are four methods that will fix any broken link (that isn’t a backlink, of course).
They are:
- Update the link. If the content moved to a new location or if there was a typo in the URL, updating the link is a sufficient fix.
- Replace the link. Let’s say there’s a broken link that you can’t restore but you happen to have a suitable replacement for it. In that case, go ahead and remove the original link and use the alternative content.
- Remove the link. If the content a broken link pointed to no longer exists, you can simply remove the link and forget about it.
- Use a redirect. Lastly, you can use a 301 or a 302 redirect to fix a broken link. Essentially, they’re ways to ‘redirect’ users from an old URL to a new URL. Bear in mind that a 301 redirect is permanent, meaning there won’t be a way to restore the original link. If you suspect that the content in question will get reinstated, use a 302 redirect instead, which is only temporary.
Now, let’s move on to finding and fixing backlinks.
Finding and Fixing Broken Backlinks
Finding and fixing broken backlinks is a bit more challenging than working with broken internal and external links. This is because your backlinks appear on other websites, and you won’t have access to their internal data under normal circumstances.
Once again, Ahrefs is the perfect tool for finding broken backlinks. Here’s how to do it.
Pull up Site Explorer and enter your domain.
On the left-hand sidebar, go to Backlink profile > Broken backlinks.
Voila, this will bring up a report containing all the broken backlinks that point to your website.
This time, finding your broken backlinks is the easy part. The challenge comes in convincing other site owners to fix them.
Fixing broken backlinks
Unfortunately, you can’t log in to another site owner’s CMS and fix the broken links that direct to your website.
Instead, you’ll have to use outreach to contact each site owner and request that they fix it.
Before you start sending out emails, do some homework on each broken backlink. Try to determine:
- If they updated or removed the content
- If they replaced your backlink with a competitor’s
- If there are any syntax or spelling errors in the backlink URL
- If the website recently went through a redesign or site migration
Knowing the underlying cause beforehand will help you craft a more compelling (and successful) email.
Once you believe you have a good idea why the link broke, you can draft a polite and concise email requesting that they fix the link.
Here’s a template you can use to get your creative juices flowing:
Dear site owner,
I’ve recently discovered that a backlink you added to my site is broken. I did a little digging and found out that (reason) most likely caused the link to break.
Would you please fix the backlink by (add fix here)? It would be a great help to my website, and I’d be willing to return the favor should you need anything from me.
Thanks,
Your name
How Often Should You Conduct Link Audits?
We’ve mentioned a few times already that you should conduct regular link audits, but how often is that?
The answer will depend on a few factors, including the size of your website, your current SEO performance, and the speed at which your competitors build links.
On average, most link audits are done on a monthly, quarterly, or six-month basis.
If you operate a large website, you should opt for a monthly or quarterly schedule. Smaller websites can typically get away with longer intervals but don’t forget to pay attention to your competitors.
If you’ve had to build a lot of links to compete with another website, you’ll want to audit them at least quarterly to ensure they’re still putting in work for you.
Make Your Broken Links a Thing of the Past
If left unchecked, broken links will wreak havoc on your SEO and user experience.
Yet, if you implement the tactics found in this article, you won’t have to worry about broken links much at all.
With the power of regular link audits, Ahrefs reports, and other methods, you’ll be able to identify and fix broken links practically as soon as they appear.
Do you need help putting together a winning link-building strategy?
Our renowned Link Outreach and Link Insertion services are your ticket to building a robust link profile. Also, don’t wait to schedule a free consultation so that we can develop a unique SEO solution tailored to your needs.
