Hey guys, this is Tim soulo from Ahrefs,
and today I wanted to talk about broken links
and broken backlinks because both of them hurt your website's performance in Google
You're watching episode number 8 of the oversimplified SEO.
[Music]
Okay, let's start from a quick FAQ.
A broken link is when a page on your site is linking to
some other page that no longer exists.
This is bad for two reasons.
First it's just bad user experience because
when people click a few links on your site
that bring them nowhere, they will simply get discouraged.
And second, Google will check every link on your page and once it sees
that some of them bring people nowhere,
it will just value your page less
because it's apparently linking to some really outdated resources.
Now let's talk about broken backlinks.
A broken backlink is when some other site is linking to a
page on your site that no longer exists.
This kind of link doesn't send you any
link juice and it doesn't help your website rank better in Google.
So now, let's see how do you find both broken links and broken backlinks and how do
you fix them to improve the performance of your website?
And as usual, I'm going to use Ahrefs' tools to help me discover broken links and broken backlinks.
This is Ahrefs' Site Explorer and I'm going to put my personal blog there
and see if it has any issues with broken links and broken backlinks.
So it's bloggerjet.com and I'll click search.
Let's search for broken links first.
I want to know if I'm linking to any pages that no longer exist.
To do that, I go to the outgoing links menu
and click on broken links report.
As you can see, from this report, my personal blog has 81 pages with broken links.
This is super lame because when I check how many pages are indexed in Google using the site
operator bloggerjet.com, I can see that in the Google index, there are 188 pages from
my personal blog. And 81 of these pages have broken backlinks! How lame is that?
This is super lame and this is actually the reason why I decided to record this
video for you.
So let's take a detailed look at one of the pages on my blog that
has lots of broken links. For example, this one.
This is an article about the so called "link roundups"
and in this article, I have created a list of over
40 different blogs that publish link roundups.
And apparently as you can see,
from Ahrefs' Site Explorer, quite a few of these blogs actually, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, are no
longer live. Let's click on this page and see if it's live or not.
Nope! It returns a 'not found' error and what I can do is find this link on
my page, like this, here it goes and simply delete this link or probably
update it to a live one.
Actually, to be honest, going through the list of 81
pages and removing or fixing all the broken links is not the most fun work in the world.
So, I would probably outsource it to a freelancer or virtual
assistant. And I'm sure once they fix all 81 pages on my blog, my organic traffic
from Google should visibly increase.
Now, let's see if my blog has any broken backlinks pointing to it.
Now, I go to the inbound links section of the reports
and click on the broken backlinks report.
As you can see, there are no broken backlinks pointing to my blog and actually this is
because I used to keep an eye on broken backlinks and fix them immediately as I see it.
But there's a website that I'm sure has tons of broken backlinks.
And this website is of course, Ahrefs.com.
Let's see how many broken backlinks we have
pointing to pages on our site. Again I go to the inbound links section
broken backlinks report.
And as you can see, we have more than 13,000
backlinks that are pointing to our site, but Google doesn't count them because
the pages that they are pointing to don't exist. For example, let's take a
look at this first one. It comes from SEOtools.net, which as you
can see is a perfectly legitimate site, but Google doesn't count a vote from
this site because it links to this page, Ahrefs' news, Ahrefs' close keywords
analysis, which is no longer there.
And there are two ways for us to fix this issue.
The first one is to simply redirect this URL, for example to our
home page, Ahrefs.com. This can easily be done with robots.txt.
Now, I'm sure many of you know how to do redirects from one page to another page.
And the second option is to actually recreate the content of this page and
put it by the same URL: /news/ahrefs close-keywords-analysis/. We no longer have the
content of this page, but luckily there's a great site, Internet Archive. You can
put any dead URL there and it will show you lots of cached versions of this page,
For example, let's go to a year, 2013, and I'm sure in
March, there was a cached version of this page.
So yeah, we pretty much see what was
there and we could just copy and paste this content and this banner and put
back the page so that links coming to this page will no longer be broken and
Google will count them and help our site rank better.
But again, we have 13,000,
actually more than 13,000 broken backlinks to our site and recreating
pages or redirecting them is not the most the most fun thing to do, so
probably we will hire again some freelancer who will analyze this whole
report and fix all the broken backlinks for us, which will again, help our website
to rank better.
To be honest, I was very surprised today when I saw how many
pages on my personal blog have broken links and how many broken backlinks
there are pointing to ahrefs.com.
Both of these reports show that we have lots of
work to do and this is a huge opportunity to improve these sites.
And I'm sure if you run these reports for your own site, you'll see quite a bunch
of broken links and broken backlinks that you can easily fix and improve your website.
[Music]
That's it for today's episode of oversimplified SEO. I hope you're enjoying
my series so far and I hope you're already subscribed to a Ahrefs' youtube channel.
Because I'm recording these episodes every single week.
See you in the next one. Bye!