No matter how well you maintain your website, eventually, you’re going to have broken links. You might have moved a page, put a typo in a link or maybe someone else linked to a page on your website that no longer (or never did) exist. The end result is a visitor or search engine arriving at a page that doesn’t exist.
Finding broken links within your website is simple and painless; you can either use W3C’s online link checker tool, or a more robust tool, like Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which is free and runs from your desktop. Finding broken links from other websites is equally simple, but takes a bit more work to fix them. First, you’ll have to dig through your server logs to find any 404 errors, then see which sites are linking to those non-existent pages and contact the site owners to have them corrected. If you can’t get in touch with the site owner, or he isn’t willing to correct the link, you’ll need to set up a 301 redirect to automatically send visitors and search engines to the correct page.
This is so important because if a visitors arrives at a non-existent page, they will usually just leave and visit one of your competitors instead. If a search engine finds several non-existent pages on your website, they may lower your ranking, which means less traffic.
Hello, my company is just establishing our first website, searching and working out what is needed. This blog stuck out right away. I’m fired up about this, and adore the design of your site!
Oh and another thing, Sarah… using these tools to find broken links on OTHER people’s sites is a good way to break the ice, and perhaps get your own links listed as a resource instead of the dead one. :D
That is a great link building idea Donna! :)
Twice, in the past, I’ve corrected some broken links, and both times, my rankings increased. Now, I won’t go so far as to say that there is absolutely, positively a direct correlation between those two things…
but it happened.
Just sayin’. :)
So, yep, everyone should be following your advice here on a routine basis. Go fix those broken links, y’all!