Retaining Your Ranking by Avoiding Broken Links

The most frustrating thing that any user would experience, while browsing through websites are the broken links. Though broken links are sure to annoy users, there are also increased possibilities for them to affect the search rankings and page rankings of the website. Broken links can never be of any help to the websites expecting the search engines to crawl their web pages, as the search engine spider would be left half hanging. This would not only resist the search engines from crawling through the pages but would also affect the search ranking (the order based on which the search engine displays the results) and the page rank that is allotted by Google. For best results, even the inner links of websites are to be checked and confirmed that there are no broken links within. The presence of such broken links would affect deep crawling of your website.

As we all know that there are two types of linking. They are namely internal links and external links. The best and simple example to explain about links would be a web application. In any web application there would be links between various modules. This would link all the modules and help in producing an integrated result. This method of linking within the system is called internal linking or inbound links. Linking the system with the outside resources is called external linking or outbound link. Similarly, websites might also have a number of inbound links and outbound links that would require the system to collect information from various resources both within the website and outside the website. Initially, the inbound links would be taken care of and then the outbound links would be looked. In this process, problem might occur if any of these links are broken and lead to blank or no page. Therefore, the best way to go about would be to find the broken links and mend it.

The simplest way of finding broken links would be to manually visit all the web pages and find the broken links. This could be the simplest of all the methods but would require a long time and would not be practical for huge websites with hundreds of pages. However, there are many other tools available in the market to have this work done automatically. These tools would crawl through all the links and generate a list of all those links that lead to broken pages with error messages. There are also options available in which you would be able to specify if any links should be omitted.
Once identified, the broken links should be rectified. Information on the type of problem that is found and what possibly could be wrong can be found through the error that is displayed. There are different error messages that have an individual number of their own. This information would help in fixing the problem. When it comes to outbound links, they need to be checked often as URLs of the resources that are linked might be changed, or the pages might have been moved or might have any similar changes.

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