How and why to remove broken links from our website
by Gaurav Gupta
By origin and destination, links, links or hyperlinks can be classified into the following types:
Internal links: links on our website that point to other pages within it.
Outbound links: Links on our website that point to other websites.
Incoming links: links from other websites that point to ours.
Broken links are those that lead to web resources that do not exist. As we discussed recently, it is good to establish a custom 404 page, but better still is to prevent users from reaching it. This event may be caused by a user typing error, but also by a broken link on our website.
There are many reasons for this to happen:
-The landing page has already been deleted.
-The landing page changed location and a redirection system was not implemented.
-The URL it points to is misspelled.
-The link points to a private page, which can only be viewed by administrators or registered users.
Broken links must be corrected or deleted for several reasons:
-They are frustrating for users.
-They give an image of unprofessionalism, being able to make us lose customers and consumers.
-Our conversion rates may be affected: if a link to buy a product or subscribe to the newsletter is broken, the conversion will not take place.
-They can damage our reputation in search engines. The spiders of search engines traverse the structure of our website links to index. A site without broken links is easier to index. In addition, the search engines value the updated sites, and the lack of dead links is a good sign.
So what can we do to solve this problem? Every certain period of time (which will depend on the volume of content of our website and its rate of growth) we can follow these steps:
-Check for broken links. We can do this through free tools like W3C Link Checker and Google Webmaster Tools.
-Correct those links manually or implement a system that allows redirecting them to internal pages other than the 404 code.
-Ask search engines to remove URLs that no longer exist.