When was the last time your website was scanned to find broken links? Over time every website will slowly get broken links, its just a natural process. Links on a website that go nowhere are bad for SEO and visitors do not like them.
Here are a few reasons it is bad to have broken links on your website:
- Broken links make your website appear to be unmaintained
- Visitors do not like to click a link that goes no where
- If bots cannot navigate your site they cannot index it
“Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site: Check for broken links and correct HTML” -Google Webmaster Tools
Correcting broken links can initially take a while, but is well worth the time. Your site’s SEO and search engine rankings will improve too. How do you do this?
If your site is built on WordPress you can install the Broken Link Checker plugin, which automatically scans your site regularly and can email you when a new broken link is detected. I recommend using both this plugin and using the next suggestion.
A good external site scanner is BrokenLinkCheck.com, which gives you a list of all of the broken links on your site.
If you’ve never scanned your site you are bound to have many broken links, which is okay, but it is vital to your website’s health that these get corrected. If you have an overwhelming amount to fix, tackle a set number per day until they are all corrected. You must correct all broken links. The next time the bots scan your site they will see you’ve corrected the broken links.
Healthy website = Better SEO 
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Good tips on plugins. From a personal perspective I know that once I click on a link on a site that takes me nowhere, I’m off that site as I don’t trust any link any more! It really does affect how a user views your site and whether they’ll ever come back.
Chris recently posted..How your wife and kids make you fat
I was just using that exact site the other day to clean up some links on a friend’s blog. I think 50% of their outbound links (all from blog commentators) were dead or broken! It sure feels nice to have no more broken links. It’s peace of mind if nothing else.
That’s a really good tip for cleaning up dead links. Especially from comments, as you can’t spend the time to manually check all of those links on each post.
That is just not feasible with even a medium sized website.
I have a Wordpress plugin on my blog that checks for broken links. It works very well. Broken links are a sure sign that the webmaster hasn’t paid enough attention to his or her website and of course a major turn off to potential customers, who aren’t likely to return to a site that can’t provide the information it advertises.
Brady Partridge recently posted..Sony XBR55HX950 3D LED TV
Thanks for the heads up on the broken link checker, just ran it and clean up 3 links. My site feels clean now
Nice post. Its true if your sites have broken links its harm for your sites seo and technical prospective. So we must use those kind of plugin for check broken links regularly.
Thanks for Sharing a Important Topic which Links harm Your site.I like your post
Yeah absolutely healthy links pass healthy link juice which become wealth of your site. We can also check broken links by WMT (Both Google & Bing). Nice post. Thanks for sharing it. Visit my SEO website here: http://www.seoexperts.co.in