There are plenty of reasons for broken links, among which we can distinguish a few of the most frequent ones: Abandoned buying processes, and in addition, broken links, like every other technical problem on websites undermine your business reputation. Potential customers may go away and choose your competitors’ websites. Broken links and business successīroken links literally mean lost business opportunities. Broken links increase bounce rates, decrease session duration, and drop conversions, which is reflected in search rankings. The impact of broken links on SEO is a little different and much deeper. In addition, there is a famous quote by Google’s John Mueller that the web changes and content gets outdated, so Googlebot will not lose sleep over broken links. However, according to Google Webmaster Central Blog, 404 pages do not affect the performance of your other URLs in search results. Many website administrators fight with broken links “in the name of Google” because they are afraid of certain sanctions. This creates a negative overall impression about the site and often results in them immediately bouncing from your site. When users stumble upon a 404 page and get frustrated, it is harder for them to achieve their intended goals on your website. And this rule is broken with broken links! When a broken link is clicked, users are confronted with a disappointing error message - most commonly, a “404 error.” The impact of broken links on your website and business Broken links and usabilityĮasily getting what is expected is a golden rule of usability. They lead to pages within or outside your website, respectively. There are internal (aka inbound) or external (aka outbound) links. What are broken links?īroken links are hyperlinks on your website that lead to non-existent web pages. So, in today’s blog post, we will see what broken links are, what causes them, what impact they may have on your site and business, and, of course, how to find and fix them. And this is a very important part of website improvement. Broken links are those little “troublemakers” that have to be caught before they lead to big consequences. However, the best websites make a regular practice of finding and fixing them. Even the best websites are never completely insured against having broken links.

Ahrefs broken link checker