What is Broken Link: How to Find and Fix It?

Broken links are terrible for quality assurance, and can negatively impact the conversion rates. Moreover, broken links are not good for SEO as well. But do you know how to fix them?

In this post, we’ll talk about why broken links are something worth considering and rectifying at the earliest.

What Are Broken Links?

Broken links, or dead links are the ones that don’t work nor redirect to the webpage they are supposed to. In case a particular website or webpage is down or doesn’t exist, then it will result in a broken link. Broken links don’t take you to the intended page and can either be backlinks, internal links, or external links can. No matter which kind of broken link you encounter, they have some common causes.

Before knowing the ways to fix broken links, let’s understand the main differences between broken internal links, broken external links, and broken backlinks.

Broken internal links are links within your content taking users to another piece of content on your site.
Broken external links are the links within your content directing to a piece of content on a different site.
Broken backlinks are links within a piece of content on another site linking to your content.

What Causes A Link To “Break”?

The main causes of the occurrence of broken links include:

Misspelled URL: One of the main causes of a broken link is misspelled of the URL of the page you’re linking to. Many times, we end up writing a website URL without https:// or http:// which results in broken backlinks.

Lost Pages: In a few cases, some of your pages were lost or renamed if you’ve migrated your website. This is because the target page is deleted or moved to a new URL without updating in the link. Deleted pages results in a 404 Not Found error page.

Broken Images: Links pointing to images can also break in case the image files are shifted or deleted without updating the links in the HTML code.  

Firewall or Geolocation Restrictions: In many cases, the link isn’t broken to everyone, rather it is accessible from certain parts of the world. Several times we come across “This content is not available at your location”. So, this is a geolocation restriction that restricts the content internationally to comply with local laws.

Moved Content: Your link to a video or document might be broken if the file has been removed from the server or shifted to some other location.

Malfunctioning Plugins: Links might not work due to malfunctioning plugins on your site, or a HTML or JavaScript error causing elements on the page to break.

Change in URL Structure: In case you have changed the URL structure of your site but haven’t deployed 301 redirects, then the internal/ inbound links to these pages will be broken.

Five Ways How to Find Broken Links

In the section below, we have covered five ways on how to fix broken links.

1. Web-Based SEO Audit Tool

The first recommended way to find and fix broken links is to use a web-based SEO audit tool. Three of the most common types of SEO audit tools include Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Sitechecker which can automatically scan your site for errors.

2. Google Search Console

GSC is useful for monitoring, maintaining, and for troubleshooting your site’s existence on various searches on Google. To begin with, first of all, you have to verify your site with GSC. Post verification, you can start benefiting from its features, including broken link detection. GSC also features a Crawl Error that provides the complete list of pages returned with a 404 error.

3. Desktop Software

In addition to the web-based SEO audit tools, one can find broken links using desktop software as well. The most common option here is Screaming Frog, which is a well-known SEO tool used to find broken links. Screaming Frog works well on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu. Post downloading and installing the program, one can easily find broken links.

4. Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin

Majorly we don’t suggest using a plugin to check broken links as they can be a big drag on your site’s performance. From a performance perspective, it’s ideal to offload these duties to a separate tool via any one of the methods above. However, there is an exception to this and that is the Broken Link Checker plugin connecting to the WPMU DEV servers. With this plugin, the site performance remains unaffected. The Broken Link Checker plugin which comes free of cost lets you connect to several sites.

5. Manual Checks

Another way to check broken links is to manually review site menus and pages and check for broken links or images. This also provides you with the user’s perspective of the broken links experience. However, this is a tedious task.

Conclusion

Broken links can significantly impact your website’s performance and reputation. Regularly searching and fixing broken links is important to maintain a seamless user experience and robust SEO health. Till now, you might be doing this task manually or with various tools, but collaborating with a professional SEO company like Kodehash Technologies can ensure thorough and efficient management of your site’s links.

In conclusion, identifying broken links is an important aspect of web application testing, and the SEO experts at Kodehash follow a straightforward approach to finding broken links using the latest tools and technologies. Moreover, we provide a cloud-based platform for testing web applications across a wide range of browsers, operating systems, and devices.