SEO Step By Step Guide– 56. Taking Care of Broken Links

Can you recollect how frustrated you were the last time when you were searching for something important and you thought you have found what you wanted but only to find out the page you thought was going to give you all the information you wanted landed up in a 404 page with the error message stating that the page you were searching cannot be found? Remember that your website visitors too will face the same frustration if your website should have broken links. That is not everything. The damaged caused is much large, it is not only the human visitors who get frustrated with broken links in websites. But it is also the search engine spiders that hate broken links.

Your website maintenance should take into consideration, broken links as one of the major aspects of the checklist. Not many webmasters are aware of the loss that they are incurring on daily basis due to what they consider as few broken links. It is these broken links that pull your website’s ranking down.
As soon as you launch your website, you must make sure to check all the links in your website; you cannot be contented thinking that the links have been tested completely offline before launching the website. So many things can go wrong while uploading our site to the server. Folders can be uploaded in the wrong places, or we may change the name of files, etc. If you have a massive site, then manually testing your links will not be a practical thing to do; there are number of online tools that are available online and as downloadable programs that will help you check your links. Therefore, save your time by using one such reliable tool. It is not enough to find the broken links but the problem has to be immediately rectified.

When you have broken links, search engine spiders will not be able to crawl your website completely. Search engine bots use your site’s navigation or your Google map in case of Google bot, when the links do not reach the landing page, then the search engines will consider your site to be under maintenance or construction. Search engines rank well only sites that are fully complete to ensure that they provide only valuable and high quality information to their users. Incomplete sites or sites under construction does not qualify their standards so they are not worthy of good placement in the search results page.
There for do spend enough time periodically to check the status of all your websites links and rectify all problems without any delay. Never think that it is just an isolated link and that it can wait, it might be the missing link for the deep crawling of your website. Also, remember to check links that are going out of your website because other websites may have deleted or moved their web pages or sites. This too can be equally harmful. So pay attention to both internal links as well as external links.

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