Broken links are dead links leads to those pages which does not exist. When clicking on a broken link, the page you land on is called a 404 error page, a standard HTTP response that indicates that the requested URL doesn’t exist.
Most websites contain broken links which occur due to many reasons and are unavoidable. Not only me and you, but everyone creates their website with lots of efforts and hard work for their visitors but if it’s links are not working, then all expenses spent to make webstore goes waste.
Manuall checking of such broken links is quitre impossible, but there are free tools available online to find such dead links.
Broken links on your website can be harmful in two ways:
They give a bad user experience – When users click on links and reach dead-end 404 errors, they get frustrated and may never return.
They devalue your SEO efforts – Broken links restrict the flow of link equity throughout your site, which impacts rankings negatively.
Some different methods to find Broken Links –
Google Search Console – The Google search console is one of the best tools which will notify you about the bad 404 links in the crawl errors section.
Broken Link Checker Plugin – If you are WordPress user, then you can use the broken link checker plugin to find the broken links on Technology Hint.
Broken Link Check – This online broken link checker is a simle tool to process and its free verion has a 3000-page limit. It finds all the broken links in your website and blog.
Screaming Frog – This is a desktop tool having lots of features to analyze the site and its free version has a 500 URLs crawl limit. It helps in finding dead links in the site.
How to Fix Broken Links –
Now, the next step is to fix all those dead links you have found.
There are two options available to fix-
Simply remove all those broken links.
Another option is to exchange all broken links with the active links manually. Also, if the same broken link is available to you in several posts, then you can redirect the plugin to fix that broken link.
