You can find these errors in your Google Search Console > Crawl > Crawl Errors: Note that they only show URLs on your website and not external links. If a page of your website is broken, they will notify you. Google Search Console can also help identify any issues with your site once their bots have crawled your site.
If you have hundreds of pages or posts on your site, you can use a tool like SEOptimer’s DIY SEO to crawl all of your pages to identify broken links – or download a plugin for your CMS platform that can check these. The simplest and fastest way to see if you have any broken links is by doing your SEOptimer report and see if there are any broken links on that page: The less time they spend on your site, the higher the bounce rate. If broken links exist on your site and the visitor cannot access the information, they will move on to a different site that can provide them the information they need. Regardless of whether you have one or many broken links, each visitor on your page will determine their decision based on usability, experience, load time and content. This will inevitably reduce your reputation. Search engines will understand that there will be some broken links, but when an actual user goes to your site, they might not be as forgiving. When search engines algorithms change, it’s because their primary goal is to provide a better search and experience for users.
Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines also use broken links to determine the quality of a site, but as long as you’re constantly checking for broken links or fixing broken links when Google notifies you of a new issue detected on your site (like in the example below), you should be able to maintain a high quality site:ĭon’t ignore the impact of a dead link: user experience is an important factor that affects SEO. That doesn’t mean that Apple will start losing their ranks, however, having too many broken links on a single page might indicate that a site is either neglected or abandoned. We even did a check on Apple’s site and scanned 2000 URLs with 9 failed responses.
Reset: the host server drops connections. Timeout: Timeout: HTTP requests constantly timed out during the link check
a missing bracket, extra slashes, wrong protocol, etc.)īad Code: Invalid HTTP response code: the server response violates HTTP specĮmpty: the host server returns “empty” responses with no content and no response code Here are some examples of error codes that a web server may present for a broken link:Ĥ04 Page Not Found: the page/resource doesn’t exist on the serverĤ00 Bad Request: the host server cannot understand the URL on your pageīad host: Invalid host name: the server with that name doesn’t exist or is unreachableīad URL: Malformed URL (e.g. Web servers will often return an error message when a user tries to access a broken link. Broken links are also often known as “dead links” or “link rots.” Examples of a broken link error code