SEO Tips When Dealing With Broken Links

DEALING WITH BROKEN LINKS

Broken links can be a big nightmare for webmasters if the situation gets out of control. The good news, there's a ton of great link checking tools to help you find broken links. If you operate on Wordpress, there's several different plugins that you can use. Google Webmaster also has apps for checking broken links. Dealing with broken links can be a hassle, especially if your making changes.

We recently did some work for an old client and he told us that he went from 0 broken links to 9,000 broken links overnight. Big red flag, right? "What did you do," I asked him. "Nothing." You don't go from 0 broken links to 9K broken links overnight unless something big changed. When I finally went into our software and checked the backlinks, every link was a 404.

So, what did I find out? My client operates an e-commerce website and they did an upgrade. They added a new "shop" feature within Wordpress and it added "shop" to every URL. It caused the entire URL structure of the website to change and caused everyone of his links to bring up 404 codes. Although this wasn't my client's fault, his rankings did fall. If the change was overnight, he probably wouldn't have dropped traffic and rankings so much. Since it took him a month to call, he lost most of his linking domains and dropped 3K indexed pages on Google.

CHANGING YOUR URL? BETTER BE PREPARED

 

If you plan to change your URL anytime soon, you better prepare to make the appropriate link changes. This can cause a whirlwind of events that can plummet your SEO rankings, not to mention your user experience. In the case above, my client's entire website was down from broken links. All the major links that we acquired in the previous year was erased during the 3.5 week process. We saw a traffic loss of 76 percent and it took a full month to recover from the traffic. The rankings still haven't recovered.

 

Although my client wasn't at fault, it shows you what can happen when you have that many broken links. This is the same reason most webmasters never change their URL. You should always be sure to use the right URL before you start building your website. As you can see with this case, you never when something can happen. In this case, his e-commerce provider was at fault. I won't mention any names but I know the website has went down (2) more times since.

 

BROKEN LINKS AND SEO

 

Broken links are not good for SEO or user experience. If your website has broken links, they need to be fixed. Yes, your SEO rankings can be affected but your also missing out on traffic. If you continue to have broken links and your website strength falls, you may also lose valuable link partners and associations. Not to mention losing valuable traffic that can hurt your bottom line.

 

Be careful who you choose to do your SEO also. We've had a few different clients that had SEO services done and they went in and changed permalinks. Without thinking or perhaps lacking real SEO skills, they made a big mess that we had to clean up. Before you make any changes to your link structures, you may want to consider the consequences of doing so.