Ever clicked on a link that led you to a 404 error page? That’s an example of a broken link—a webpage that can’t be found or accessed because the URL is misspelled, the structure of the website has been altered or the webpage no longer exists.
That’s a concern, especially pertaining to your link-building efforts, as having your project linked by a third party leading to a broken page wastes your efforts to gain visibility, traffic and even reliability. Here we offer some tips to have a broken link strategy as part of your digital marketing to avoid these issues.
What’s at Risk When You Have Broken Links?
The effects of broken links in your marketing strategy are much more significant than wasting the opportunity to lead traffic to your website. It affects your SEO in general as a broken link means that the quality assurance is broken, too. In practical matters, this translates into:
- Lower conversion rates
- Indirect, affect the bounce rate and therefore page and website traffic
- Reduced time on site
- Decline in SEO rankings because landing on a webpage that offers poor user experience indicates that your website is old and outdated.
Ensuring that there aren’t broken links leading to your site is part of ensuring your link building for SEO and overall SEO strategies are effective.
How to Find Broken Links?
You may simply not be aware that there are broken links leading to your website, so finding this out is the first step to fixing it, and there are simple ways to do it.
The most common tool is via Google Webmaster Tools:
- Head to Google Webmaster Tools and click on “Crawl Errors”
- See all the broken links on your website—meaning the broken links you have internally linked within your website’s domain.
Now that you are able to see all the broken links, you can replace them or remove them by:
- Selecting the URL from the list of broken links
- Removing or replacing the URL on your website
- Updating the changes.
Executing a broken link strategy for your link building requires more work but the effort is worth it to fix those backlinks. Broken link checker tools are offered in SEO software such as Ahrefs, Moz and SEMrush where you can scan your domain and find all the broken URLs on your site.
So, what to do now?
Don’t Waste Your Backlinks!
Link building is important for SEO since having backlinks on your website become broken links when changes in your website happen, such as:
- HTTP to HTTPS
- Switched URL structure
- Deleted page.
External backlinks will continue to lead nowhere unless you contact the person from the third-party platform and ask to swap the link. This isn’t precisely a fun, efficient or quick way of fixing the issue but it’s actually the only way to make your backlinks profitable.
The good news? Broken link building for SEO outreach isn’t rocket science. All you have to do is find the person in charge of the website and send them an email requesting to swap the broken link on their website for a working one.
But first things first—contact AmaZix, experts in SEO and crypto marketing, to create a link-building strategy that suits your needs.
