Why to check broken links
Why to check your broken and dead pages
There are several factors that can improve the "visibility" of the site and influence the site ranking in Google and other search engines.
An important aspect of search engine optimization is work with content; the promotion success depends on content quality and quantity.
Many blogs, articles and services offer guides and recommendations on content organization, keyword selection and compilation of semantic core. However, the topics of monitoring and tracking the content availability are mostly overlooked.
Why broken links can damage your online business
Customer aspect
A client visits the site to obtain information and cannot find it because the page is not available.
At best, the customer goes to other pages on the site, and at worst just leaves the site. Your bounce rate increases and the client is lost.
Search engine visibility
If the site contains too many pages with a response code "404", it can have a negative impact on your website's ranking with major search engines. The entire site or individual pages may receive a Google penalty, site rankings can fall, and the number of visits is reduced.
Losing backlinks
The number of incoming links to your website impacts on search engine ranking. Any website owner knows how difficult it is to get quality links and references.
At the same time, not enough attention is given to monitoring the availability of external linked pages.
Broken links = Lost opportunities
Creating and managing website content is a complex process, which is always associated with many manual adjustments. Multiple site editors, frequency updates, the need for constant content updating - all this processes increase probability of various errors. The most important errors associate with the creation and addition of non-existing pages or broken links.
Despite the fact that the link verification is an obvious need, most webmasters and site owners do not give enough attention to this issue or just ignore it. They lose opportunities to promote own site because of this very trivial problem.
Why broken links are bad?
First of all, they left a bad feeling about your company or product and you can lose a potential customer. You should respect customers and display only working content!
Also, broken links make your site indexing by search engines more complicated, and, therefore, reduce the possibility of your site correct ranking.
Your broken links are your competitors’ benefits
Your broken links are opportunities for other webmasters to raise their website rating at your expense. The link building due to non-existent pages (404 error) and dead links is very popular among webmasters. Many manuals and tools were created for broken links search and replace them with their own links. This is a simple and free link building in a legal way (white hat seo). If you do not care about your broken links, it will make others. Perhaps, while you read this text, other webmasters are already hunting for your dead links. Do not give them this chance!
