Broken links can be the Achilles’ heel of your website’s SEO strategy. Not only do they create a frustrating experience for users, but they also negatively impact your search engine rankings.
A broken backlink is a link between two websites that breaks due to certain reasons, typically leading to an error page, like a 404.
So Understanding the significance of fixing broken Backlinks for SEO, we gathered insights from industry professionals, including SEO experts and digital marketing consultants. From mitigating the user experience impact to preserving context with detailed anchor texts, here are the top nine strategies they recommend for maintaining a robust online presence.
After consulting with over 9 industry experts, we have identified effective solutions for fixing broken links. Here’s what they suggest.
Broken links negatively impact user experience, which leads to worsened behavioral metrics on your website. Google pays attention to users’ behavior and may downgrade websites with poor user experience in organic search results. That’s why you should care about who you link to and who links back to you.
Since no one wants to send bad signals to Google, website owners will likely replace broken links after noticing the issue. The goal is to encourage them to replace a broken link with your page.
Here’s how I approach broken link building:
This simple strategy has worked for me and will hopefully work for you, too.
Victoria Kurichenko
SEO Expert and Content Writer, Self Made Millennials
There are three primary reasons that fixing broken links is important, each affecting different website success metrics.
“The first reason it is important is the effect it has on website user experience. A page with broken links can provide a poor UX for your visitors, who may be likely to bounce from your website and go elsewhere if they encounter links that don’t work.”
“Another important factor is search engine indexing. Search engines may have difficulty navigating and indexing your website properly if they encounter numerous broken link. If this problem becomes too severe, then search engines may choose to crawl your website less frequently or reduce your crawl budget.”
“Finally, link equity can be negatively affected by broken backlinks as well. If a link goes to a 404 page on your website, then essentially the equity or “link juice” behind that link is being wasted and not being passed on to help a relevant page rank. This is the case for both internal and external links.”
The best strategy for finding broken links is to use an SEO tool such as Ahrefs, which will often highlight these links for you. Using a tool such as Search Console to regularly audit your 4XX or 5XX pages is key as well. Once you have identified these pages, you can use a backlink checker to see if there are any links pointing to the broken page. From there, the best step is to change the URL of the link itself and point it to a more relevant live page. If this isn’t possible, however, then implementing a 301 redirect is also an acceptable solution.
Danny Watkinson
Search Engine Optimization Manager, 20i
Broken Backlinks on your website can send users to dead-end pages on other sites, causing frustration. Having many of these can make your site look poorly maintained to search engines.
One strategy for finding and fixing broken links is to install a plugin (like Broken Link Checker) that regularly scans for broken link and then schedule time to work on them.
Benjamin Tagg
Marketing Strategist and SEO Consultant, Newbird LLC
Broken links hurt user experience, which in turn increases your bounce rate. If a user gets interrupted during their customer journey due to poor navigation experience, they might seek a better solution elsewhere. There are online scanners and even plugins for your chosen CMS for detecting broken links.
Another good tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Once you’ve identified broken link, fix them by creating a page with relevant content or setting up a 301 redirect where that URL sends visitors to the next most relevant page. Never attempt to repair a broken link by sending users to your home page, as that just sends them backward in their customer journey and further away from a conversion.
Kevin Hall
Digital Marketing Consultant, Halls Consulting
Every company involved in SEO knows about and actively works on Google’s common ranking factors. However, the real winners in search engine optimization are those who go beyond the basics, implementing small but critical changes to get ahead of their competition. One often-overlooked area is broken links.
By regularly reviewing and fixing them, you differentiate yourself in a way that Google recognizes and rewards. A practical approach is to conduct a monthly site audit, receiving a report that highlights broken links. Share this report with your team, emphasizing the importance of resolving these issues promptly.
Jason Vaught
Founder and CSO, 805SEO
Fixing broken links is a high-priority SEO action item. A regularly performed SEO audit should highlight these issues. With a broken link, you are wasting resources, not providing content that was obviously needed at some point when a link was made (or when a page was renamed), and you are also providing a negative user experience on your site. All of these things are bad.
Errors of all kinds have a cumulative effect on your site-wide quality score. We proactively identify these types of issues and conduct a deep GSC cleanup process, which is highly aligned with the error category of broken links.
Trevor Stolber
Agency Owner STOLBER Digital
Fixing broken links is important for SEO, as it consolidates link equity and redirects it to pages that can benefit from it. To manage this, conduct regular website audits to identify broken links. Once you find them, update these links with the correct URLs. I personally use Ahrefs and Screaming Frog to find all the broken links on my website.
Taylor Scher
SEO Consultant TaylorScherSEO
It’s important simply because it plays directly into the user experience of a website.
The minute a user tries to click a link on your website to go to another page on your website, or to a different website, they will lose trust and faith in that site if that link doesn’t work.
It’s so important that people can easily flow between pages on a website, and your internal links allow you to do that.
The more you put in, the better; but unfortunately, obviously, the more you put in, the more likely you are to get broken ones.
So, a strategy for fixing is to use SEMrush’s backlink audit feature. This will scan all your website’s internal and external links, find any broken ones, and tell you which pages have the broken links, so you can go through and fix those nice and methodically, almost like a regular to-do list.
Aled Nelmes
Founder and CEO, Lumen SEO
Fixing broken link matters for SEO because Google uses anchor texts to understand what a page is about. When links break, this context gets lost. A free way to handle this is by using BrokenLinkCheck.com. It’s free and spots broken links easily. Once you find them, just replace or fix these links. Make sure your anchor texts are detailed, so they tell Google exactly what the page is about.
Harry Boxhall
Shopify SEO Expert, Swirl SEO
Analyzing and fixing broken links is crucial for keeping your website’s performance healthy and smooth. It’s not about just fixing any existing problems but also setting up a strong system for maintaining your backlinks. Keep in mind, that a website that’s easy for users to navigate and has few broken link doesn’t just make visitors happy and satisfied– it also gets a ranking boost from Google Crawler.
So, if you’ve suddenly found your website’s performance isn’t as great as it could be, start by applying these expert tips to find and fix those frustrating links.