What is a Broken Link?

"I got a notice of a broken link on my site but I can't find it."

You and me both! If you are using helpful tools to check your sites performance, you might run into an error message stating “broken link”.

Broken link? What does that even mean?

Internet bots crawl your website in search for information that’s relevant to search inquiries. Next, these bots click on every single link and buttons on your website. Links the bots click on repeatedly with no response get reported as broken. Finally, they report what they found, a link that did nothing. This brings your sites overall health score down. When your site isn’t healthy, it reflects poorly for your website or for anyone listing you as a backlink.

How do you fix a broken link?

First, is knowing IF there are any problems. Next, once you run a scan of your website you’ll get a report. This report lists all of the pages you have and their status. Some pages will return an error message, you have to go into those pages and find the broken link(s). Links are very delicate and critical, they must be entered correctly in order for them to function properly.

Maybe you bought an SSL Certificate and switched your website from http to https, now all of the links you had as “http” need an added “s”. Something so simple can really mess everything up. Check that all the links in the page are working properly and recrawl your site. You will see the error message disappear if you succeeded in correcting everything. If you get the same error for several pages, your broken link might be in a widget or menu item that is displayed on every page. In conclusion, once you fix it, all of the pages should be fine, recrawl the page and the error message should be gone.