Why should I check for broken links to help SEO?

I like to come at you with some authority first so you know I’m not talking out of my lower end.  Today’s bit of authority comes to us directly from G.

The design and content guidelines for webmasters states specifically:

Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

This one is pretty simple.  Google is trying to create the best user experience possible.  They think “nobody likes broken links” which is ultimately true, unless you’re a fan of Homestar Runner. (“Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined.”*)

But you control all of your links and they shouldn’t be broken, right?

If SEO and website work was that easy, would you be here right now, reading this?  You’d be on the beach, getting a tan.  Maybe you’re on the beach reading this. In which case, your life beats mine right now.  Anyways, I digress.

So yes, you should check for dead or broken links.

How do links become broken?

Links can be right at the time you create them and die off later.  Let’s say you move from a Blogger blog to a WordPress based blog.  All your old links are now dead wherever you linked them on the rest of your site.  Interconnected posts are also like that, especially if you change link structure or the blog folder.  (say your new link is http://site.com/blog instead of http://site.com/wordpress/blog)

Links can also break if they are left as comments on your blog posts.  People’s businesses go under, they change web addresses, commenters who aren’t really “regulars” online leave broken comments all the time, thus undermining that particular posts’s SEO juice.

So links may break in a variety of ways. Your job is to find them and clean them up.

Checking for broken links

Use Google Webmaster Tools (see: SEO services) to find broken links under Crawl Errors > Not Found. Click to enlarge the photo:

If your site is a WordPress site, there is another way.  Download, install and use the Broken Links Checker plugin.  I use this everyday and have it automatically email me when a link becomes broken.

 

Fix your broken links

When you find broken links in Google, you need to manually fix the broken links.  In Broken Link Checker, you can unlink (most common), fix the link (if you see what’s wrong) or mark it as not broken.  I often use unlink – this simply breaks the code and puts the word that is linked in plain text.  Done.  If it’s wrong, I fix it. If I check and the site is still there it means they were having a hiccup and I mark as not broken.

There you have it: another quick and easy SEO fix. 

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* Today’s humor brought to you by cabbage and the letter Delta.