What is a broken link
It is important to spot broken links as they are detrimental to your website. Broken links hurt the user experience as it turns into an error message. They can negatively impact your acquisition rate and conversion rate. But also, significantly increase your bounce rate. They also have a negative impact on your website’s ranking on SERPs. Here are some pointers on what a broken link is and how you can fix them in your SEO strategy.
Bad for SEO
A broken link is bad for the site on which it is located and for the site to which it links, if it still exists. Users will be annoyed and may go to another site to find the information that should normally be accessible through the link. Too many broken links are also troublesome for the SEO of the site. It is necessary to regularly search for possible broken links and to correct or remove them.
Find them
To fix broken links, that is, inbound (internal links) and outbound (external links), you must first locate them. There are many free and paid broken link tools available to help you locate them, like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, Dead Link Checker, SEMrush, Chrome extensions like “Check My Links”, and many more.
Change them
Modify the broken link. This is the choice to make when the page to which the link led has changed structure or has been deleted. All you have to do is correct the link by specifying the new address of the page or the address of a new equivalent page. This, even though it belongs to another site.
Delete them
When the link points to a page that has been deleted and there are no real similar pages, it is possible to simply decide to delete the dead link.
Remove the links
Update all links pointing to a moved internal page. For an outdated internal page, remove all links to it from your content or find something comparable that deserves a link. Finding this out gives you insight into what and why someone chose to link to the previous content.
Remember: broken links are a real problem for web project owners. Also, to avoid a management that may be too time-consuming, the best is to regularly make checks on the possible presence of dead links on your site.