What do broken website links mean?

Imagine performing a search on a website only to be led to an error 404 page. Broken website links can lower your website rankings, harm your website's relationship with Google and lower your website visitors' user experience. 

How bad are broken links? 

Also known as “link rots” and “dead links”, broken links are defined as disastrous and chaotic to a website. When users and Google cannot easily identify and find content within your web page, it negatively impacts your website visitors' user experience as well as your rankings within Google's search engine. 

How to fix broken links: internal 

Once identifying the broken link, decide if it is a high-value page. This is done by signing into your Google Analytics account and viewing the page traffic. If it is not a significant source of traffic an option is to remove the link entirely, or re-link it to a relevant page on the website. 

How to fix broken links: External 

Websites perform updates all of the time. As a result, external broken links can be harder to keep track of. Our recommendation is to perform website audits and use a broken link checker every month. To do this, log into your Google Search console account, select your website and click crawl. Another way to do this is to log into your Google Analytics account and click, behaviour, then view all pages. If there is a broken link and the article does not exist anymore you can remove the link entirely, or another option is to include the content that you are referring to on your website as a blog entry or separate page and place the link as an internal link. 

How valuable are links and how bad are broken links

The importance of a web link, internal or external, depends on if the page that it links to is high ranking. External links provide value if they are relevant to the page that they are placed on. In this case, external links can increase the authority of your website on Google and your organization's trustworthiness. Internal links connect your content to Google. Through internal links, Google can identify and source, the content of your website as links submit and identify what each page of your website is about. 

Imagine being a prospective customer and starting a website search or wanting more information about a business. You are excited and invested in starting your search journey only to receive a message that the page has not been found. Roughly 90% of website visitors are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience. 

From damaging the authority of your website, staining your business reputation, and lowering your SEO and customer experience, broken links are extremely damaging. The Bloomtools team provides local support that you can count on, supporting you with coding, marketing and design experts with secure and reliable websites. Bloomtools provides SEO to ensure that your website is found on Google’s search engine and that your links are consistent. Contact us today to discuss your link strategy.