UrduBloggingHub | Informatvie Blog About SEO & Blogging: Effects Of Broken Links On Blogs Is Your Worst Enemy. Few Ideas To Defeat It.

Before I begin to explain the effects of Broken Links on blogs, I have to explain the meaning of broken links.  In simple term, Broken links are regarded to as web links or URLs that are unreachable. You may ask, how does that concern you? Don’t worry, just keep reading :-D

The links that appear on a website/blog can be categorise into two, i.e. internal links and external links. Internal links are hyperlinks that point to another page on the same website, while external links are links that point at external domain. Internal links can be controlled. But in the case of external links, you have no control. It’s advisable to use external links only sparingly or when necessary.

Most likely, broken links will land users on a 404 error page. Broken links occur:

1. When wrong URL is used
2. When the linked page has been deleted
3. When the address is changed without updating the attached URL in the link
4. When there is no proper navigation

Effects of Broken Links:

From search engines perspective, let us consider the effect of broken links. If a search spider visits your blog/website and found lots of broken links, it can cause your blog a lot of problems. Broken links are like a stop sign that stops the progress of a search engine spider. In short, excessive broken links diminishes the value of your blog/website in the eyes of the search spiders.

Apart from search engines, broken links are nuisance to human visitors. Excessive broken links discourage users to do further navigation of the site. Broken links also affect the amount of free traffic to your site and search engine spiders will interpret this as a high bounce rate which is not good for site rankings.

SEO services include making your website user friendly. But if your site has too many dead links, users will just move on to the next site on the results page. This affects the amount of free traffic to your site and search engine spiders will interpret this as a high bounce rate which is not good for site rankings.

Google is particularly specific when it included in its webmaster’s guidelines used by your search engine optimization company, to “Check for broken (dead) links and correct HTML” in your website. While it doesn’t hurt to have a few dead links, it will definitely reduce its rankings drastically if there are excessive dead links on your website.

If your site has too many dead links, it can badly affect its conversion rate. Users are discouraged to do further navigation of the site if they encounter too many dead links on your site. To keep the users on the site, such links should be converted to a customized 404 page.

Dead hyperlinks on websites are not just annoying – their existence may cause some real damage to your online business as well as to your reputation in the Internet!  

Because of that a web-site may:

• Lose some of the existing customer base (current users sooner or later will get frustrated enough to never come back)
• Get problems with getting new customers (because of the dead weblinks people simply won’t be finding things/pages they are looking for).
• Damage your reputation online (most of online customers consider stale hyperlinks as demonstration of no respect to them from the site’s owners)
• Have negative impact on your website’s ratings with major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.

Major search engines consider user experience of a website as a basis for giving search engine rankings to a site. And link validity is considered as a key factor in determining user experience. Hence, it can be said that dead links do affect the SEO rankings of a website since it increases a website’s bounce rate which directly affects website ranking.

All that presents issue so serious that people sometimes say the “link rot problem” (or linkrot) referring to it (as you may already know “rotten” weblink is just another name for the same “dead URL” situation.

How to Defeat This Fault:

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From The Author:

In conclusion, it’s pertinent to keep an eye on broken links. Major search engines consider user experience of a website as a basis for giving search engine rankings to a site. Ensure that your blog/website doesn’t contain multiple broken links.

Ensuring that your website does not contain multiple dead or broken links is one of your saving grace when it comes to website ranking. Make it a habit to check your pages, check your links and update it, and make sure that you update your sitemap every time you delete a page to avoid having broken links.