Broken links can affect SEO in several ways:
- Site quality: Google wants to recommend whatsapp lead useful, up-to-date sites. Too many broken links can indicate that your site is outdated or poorly maintained.
- Crawl Errors: Google’s site crawlers , or “bots,” crawl the web by following links between pages. When a bot finds a broken link, it creates a crawl error. This means your page can’t be fully crawled and indexed by search engines.
- Wasted Link Authority: Internal links pass authority (known as link equity ) between connected pages on your site. But when Page A links to a broken Page B, that authority is wasted rather than passed on The impact on SEO.
The more broken links you have on your site, the greater the impact on quality, crawlability, and SEO rankings .
The impact on UX
Broken links can seriously harm user experience (UX). Users may abandon your site if they repeatedly reach dead ends by clicking on broken links.
For example, imagine you shop on recapitulating our article on website architecture Amazon but repeatedly run into 404 product page errors due to broken links, and end up on a page similar to this:
Constantly hitting dead ends can make users perceive your site as unreliable and poorly maintained.
How to find and fix broken links
Semrush Site Audit
Semrush Site Audit can crawl an entire site to detect crawl errors and broken links.
Here’s how.
First, you will need to create a new project or click on an existing one:
Next, click on the ” Issues ” tab when the audit is complete and enter ” Broken ” in the search bar to find issues related to broken links:
You may see a list of errors similar to this:
Click ” X internal links are broken ” or any other error. This will show you a report of the pages that contain broken links.
Hover over ” Why and how to fix it ” to learn more about the specific issue and how to fix it.
Regular site audits with Semrush’s Site Audit tool can automatically detect broken links on your site.
Find and fix sitemap issues
with the Site Audit Tool
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC ) is a free tool from Google that allows website owners to monitor their site’s presence in Google search results.
GSC’s Page Indexing report can help you identify broken links.
How do you find this report?
Log in to GSC and go to ” Indexing ” > ” Pages ” in the left menu.
The report shows indexed pages that return 404 or other errors.
Click “Not Found (404)” to see a list of pages that return 404 errors.
Browser Extensions
Browser extensions like Check My Links and Broken Link Checker will automatically check links on pages as you browse and highlight broken ones.
Install the extension in Chrome. This adds a plugin icon next to the address bar.
As you browse through your site’s pages, the extension scans and analyzes all links in the background.
Links that return 404 or other error codes will appear highlighted on the page The impact on SEO.
Manual checks
Another option is to manually review australia database directory the menus and pages of your site and check for broken links or images. This gives you user insight into the broken link experience, but it can be quite tedious.