Broken links can have a negative impact on your rankings and compromise user experience. The last thing you want is for a user to encounter a broken link when they want access to more information.
This is often an indication of a poorly maintained website and can increase website abandonment rates. It is important to find and fix broken links as often as you can.
Find Broken Links
You can find broken links using freely available online tools like Google Analytics. These tools will scan your entire website and create a list of broken links. This process takes a little time based on the size and age of your website. For example, an e-commerce website with hundreds of pages might have several internal and external broken links.
It might take some time for the software to identify them all. You can set up a monthly report in Google Analytics. The software will send reports on the number of 404 redirects on your website and you can track the links accordingly.
Create a Priority List
Links are easy and quick to fix if you have a relatively small website with just a couple of errors. But if you have a big website, you might need to create a list of priorities to ensure you fix the most essential broken links first. Google Analytics can help you with this process as well.
Check how much traffic the 404 error page receives from users clicking on a particular page title or link. The titles or links with the most amount of traffic needs to be at the top of the priority list. You can start fixing links at the top of the list first and make your way down over time. This ensures that the pages that receive the most traffic are fixed first.
This is the perfect opportunity to replace broken links that have outdated information with good links that have current data. That can help improve user experience and credibility. Just perform a simple search to find adequate replacements for the best results.
