Broken Links: How to Find and Fix Them

Do you have a website and have been told that you have some broken links? Have you heard that broken links affect your page ranking and your link building strategy? And after hearing it several times... do you feel like you don’t really know what those broken links are and how to fix them?

Don’t worry. We’ve all been in that situation. For this reason, throughout this article, I will guide you to understand what broken links are and what ways we have to prevent them from affecting our website. From their definition to the most effective tasks.

Let’s get started!

Definition of Broken Links: Let’s Start from the Beginning

Broken links are those links that point to a page that is no longer available. This results in a 404 error, which indicates to the user that the page cannot be found.

These broken links can occur both between internal pages (linking to other content on our website that is not available) and external pages (linking to another website that no longer exists or cannot be found).

How can we end up with broken links on our website? There are different ways. It is possible that the URL we linked to has changed after we placed our link, which will prevent the user from reaching it when they click (unless a redirect has been made, but I will explain that later).

Another case where a broken link can occur is by incorrectly entering the link. There may be a letter out of place or some element of that URL that we have “missed”.

If there has been a website migration or the content we linked to has been removed, we will also encounter the famous 404 error indicating that there are broken links.

Now, you might be wondering how to detect those links that change or how to know that external content has been removed. And no, constantly monitoring all of them is not a viable option. So, are there ways to detect those broken links? Of course, but I will explain that in the next section.

How to Detect Broken Links on My Website

Once we have a better understanding of the definition of broken links and the main causes for their occurrence, let’s take action.

Detecting broken links in time will save us from penalties in our web positioning. So let’s get to work… where do we start?

There are different tools we can use to detect those broken links or 404 errors. Some of the most common options are:

• Google Search Console: Google’s own tool quickly provides us with a list of those URLs causing us this type of problem. In its “Coverage” section under “Excluded,” they appear as “Not Found (404)”.

• Ahrefs: a great tool that stands out in the SEO world. With Ahrefs, we can analyze all types of links on our website with its link checker.

• SEMrush: this is another major tool in the web positioning world that, as expected, also provides us with information about our broken links. When performing site audits, we will obtain a series of errors among which are these broken links.
• Screaming Frog: this is software that is installed on our computer and thoroughly analyzes the website we want, giving us data on client 4xx errors that will help us locate those broken links.
• Dr Link Check: this is a free website that analyzes online, in about five minutes, all the broken link issues we may have.

These are just some of the most commonly used resources for detecting broken links, but there are also other alternatives that can provide you with this information, such as WordPress plugins and more online tools.

I Have Detected the Broken Links... Now How Do I Fix Them?

Once we have located the broken links, we can move on to fixing them. Here we will encounter two situations:

Internal Broken Links

In these cases, we will perform a 301 redirect so that the old URL that is causing the error leads to the new URL without issues.

How is this done? Let’s suppose we have misspelled the URL of our blog (we wrote “blgo”) and want to redirect it to the correct one that we have already modified. A simple option is to include it from .htaccess by adding “Redirect 301 /blgo https://www.unancor.com/en/blog”. After including this, we save, and the redirect will have occurred, thus saving the broken link.

We can also use certain WordPress plugins such as Rank Math, which includes a redirection section. Or the simple and intuitive Redirection, which with two simple steps makes the redirection for us.

External Broken Links

If our broken link is in a post from another page (incoming link), the ideal is to contact the administrators of that website so they can change it to the correct URL, thus preventing the user from encountering a 401 error.

It may also happen that we have a link pointing to an external page (outgoing link) that no longer exists or has changed its URL. In this case, we need to fix it, and a 301 redirect can also be applied.

Finally, you should know that detecting broken links on websites of interest can give us the opportunity to place our links on pages in our sector and niche websites that benefit us. It requires work and, above all, having content that is useful for that website to decide to change the broken URL for ours.

If we detect those broken links and suggest that they can change it to our link, offering a relevant anchor text, sometimes we will obtain quality links. Obviously, this depends on the administrator of that website, who may choose to restore the original link.

Why It Is Important to Fix Broken Links

Before closing this article, it is worth highlighting the main reasons why we should fix our broken links.

First of all, it is important for maintaining our SEO ranking. If we have broken links, when Google crawls, it will not only have problems finding those pages and indexing them, but it can also make us lose link juice and crawl budget, losing visibility in the process.

On the other hand, the user may feel some distrust when clicking on non-functioning links. It projects an image of unprofessionalism and a neglected website, leading them to believe that the information provided is not accurate or useful. Having broken links to other pages also harms the usability of our website.

These errors and feelings in the user impact our own brand image, causing our online reputation to decline and our target audience to end up choosing competitors' media and businesses.

Of course, we must not forget that incoming broken links from other websites to ours will cause us to lose visits and authority if they are not fixed.

For all these reasons, broken links on your website must be detected and fixed as soon as possible. Remember that quality links are an essential factor in your SEO ranking.

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