Hey everyone this video is going to be pretty short and sweet
I shouldn't need to go into great detail about why broken links are bad or to convince you to fix them
If you've ever clicked on a broken link then you know how frustrating it can be
Or at least how poorly it reflects on that site
And all it really takes is that one split second of look for a user to navigate away from your site
Compared to duplicate content to clunky navigation or other issues
broken links rate first in annoying site visitors
If one page doesn't work they'll naturally think that other pages won't work either
sloppy site let's get out of here
And if you run any kind of business or
e-commerce site then this is very dangerous and a vital threat to your revenue
Not only will potential customers leave your site at the first sign of trouble
They're also quite likely to tell their friends and family
about any negative experience
Hey I was thinking to buy a shirt on these
such-and-such website man it's pretty garbage I wouldn't bother
And there you go flash judgment a two seconds negative review that keeps business away
And all because of a couple of broken links
not because of prices or the quality of the product
It's a brutal snap judgment world out there with a very short
attention span but hey what can you do those are the cards we've been dealt
So broken links are obviously very bad for user experience and it's bad for SEO
Since broken links interrupt the flow of link equity in your site
and leave a bad taste in the mouths of search engines
Now real spiders may love to crawl into
dark holes and stay there but search engine spiders don't like these dead ends
Plus if users are always quick to leave your site then you'll have a high bounce rate
Search engines they'll see that high bounce rate and can easily
decide that your content isn't worth indexing
Looks like all these people are quick to leave this website that sells shirts
So maybe it's not so relevant for
all those people that are searching for shirts
let's move this lower down in the search results
So always remember that user experience is directly linked
to search engine results pages and vice-versa
Now especially for a large website with lots of links
and content that is often updated
you should definitely get in the habit of checking for broken links every now and then
But even if you have a small website that you're about to put online and never really alter
Still don't neglect to run your site through our broken links checker
So after running my website here on SEO
site checkup yeesh looks like out of ten links on this page
four of them are broken that's just downright awful
If I click on each of these I can see that those URLs don't even exist
All you get is a 404 page
And three of them are links to other pages within my own website
pretty sloppy stuff here
Now fixing the issue is obviously easy
In this case it really just looks like I've got some typos here
So all I need to do is edit my HTML
and fix those one by one
Now plenty of times it's not going to be your fault
You may very well have a link to a valid website
But then at some point without your
knowledge it's taken down by the owner or it's having server issues or the
owner hasn't paid their hosting bill whatever
Totally outside your control
In fact link rot as it's known which is simply the reality of URLs becoming
invalid over time as the internet landscape constantly evolves
Has proven to be pretty high by some studies
Every 7 or so years you can probably expect to
lose about 15 to 25% of your links
Obviously here I mean external links not internal links to pages within your own site
The websites go down people's
interests and business models change brands change nothing is forever
Anyway not your fault but
nevertheless it will be a mark against you as far as the search engines are concerned
And you're not alone in having broken links so don't be too hard on yourself
Even websites like apples have broken links from time to time
The point is it's very very very
important to eliminate those links or replace them with links to valid active URLs
Your site visitors will be happier resulting in more time spent on your
site in a lower bounce rate
And then search engines won't drop your PageRank
for a high bounce rate or for having too many dead ends
And if you want a set it and forget it way to monitor these broken links you're in luck
SeoSitecheckup has a check up has a tool just for that scanning your pages for
broken links on a regular basis
Each week you'll get a summary of your SEO
score and top SEO issues to fix
And any broken links you have will be shown here
Feel free to check out our other videos so you can keep fine-tuning and getting
the most out of your SEO and click subscribe to stay updated with
new tips and tricks to get you to the top of the search engine results pages