Broken links and redirects
If links are an important ranking factor for SEO, it stands to reason that broken links are a bad thing. Therefore, if you are doing SEO for your own website, it behoves you to do a broken link check at least once every 6 months to make sure you don’t have any.
Why are broken links bad?
Links act as a vote of confidence from one site to the next, in the same way as citations work for academic and peer-reviewed journals. The more citations a particular work has, the more authoritative it is. The more quality links a particular site has, the more authoritative the site seems in Google’s eyes. The more authoritative it is, the more likely Google is to feature it often in search results.
Ergo, when a link from a quality website to yours becomes broken, either because they took down the page linking from their site (boo!) or you took down or moved the page on your site (shame on you!), that means one less quality link to your website. This is a bad thing.
However, all is not lost
If the link is broken due to the other site taking down their page or simply removing the link, get in touch with them and see if you can’t get it back or placed elsewhere on their site.
If the broken link is at your end, you need to put a redirect in place from the old location to the new. Depending on how your site is setup, this can be done by yourself or you may need to get your developer or SEO agency to help you out.
How do you find out if your site broken links?
First, you need to get a list of links pointing towards your website. The first place to look is in your Google Search Console account. If you don’t have one, set one up for free here. Google Search Console is a way for Google to communicate with you as a site owner directly.
In addition, paid for services like Majestic SEO are a good way to get a more comprehensive list of links. I have tried a few others, but Majestic SEO is really the best one in my opinion.
Once you have your list of links, there are a few ways to find out if they are broken or not. You can simply click on each one, which is incredibly laborious (depending on how many links you have pointing towards your site), or you can run this through a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider. What this tool does is it visits every link you show it and tells you if they are live, redirect or are not found (e.g. broken), the latter of which is easily exported into an Excel spreadsheet for your review.