Broken Links Testing
Broken Links Testing
“This link appears broken” — not what you want to see about your website! But just how important are broken links in affecting your website visitor numbers (and visitor experience)? I was discussing this with a friend and client earlier today and here’s what I basically said to him.
Like you, I’ve read many times that broken links affect SEO, but I do wonder just how significant having a broken link here or there is in affecting the SEO of your site and its ranking in the search engines. For one thing, it appears to me that although Google and other search engines do take account of ‘sites’ as separate entities, they are more interested in pages as discrete entities. If so, then an individual page with a broken link might be ranked lower in the search results while not affecting other pages at the same site much, if at all.
The only way to find out whether broken links actually do affect SEO, and to what degree, would be to do some testing.
Broken Link Testing
To test the significance of broken links someone would have to set up a site, get traffic to it via the search engines, then once it is all running smoothly and it has a few months traffic (so that the level of traffic can be reasonably gauged) they would then have to deliberately remove a page in order to break a link.
However, if the page removed was receiving traffic (as it undoubtedly would be, however small an amount) then that loss of traffic would have to be factored into the equation.
Broken link testing would also have to be carried out on a larger scale to see if having lots of broken links was significant, and by how much.
Now, it may be that such tests have been done, but I don’t remember having read about any or seen any results. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone had tested this because there are people who spend their working lives testing Google and its responses to all sorts of things.
How does this affect your site?
I would advise that unless you have a lot of broken links that you know about, not to be overly concerned about the _potential_ problem. If you know about broken links on your site then you can either set up a redirect to the correct page or even build a new page at the location of the missing one (or remove the broken link or links altogether).
But if you’re always careful to avoid broken links and you always keep in mind the rule that once a URL exists it effectively exists forever (a good approach to have, even if not strictly true) then it shouldn’t be a significant problem for your site. Lots of things affect SEO and broken links is just one potential thing.
My client complained that free broken link testing services online only test the first 500 pages of a site (and he has a very large site), but if you have a smaller site such services could be very useful if you have reason to believe this problem could be affecting your site.
One method to discover if you have broken links is to look at your error stats — you should be able to see these whatever host you use. With advanced statistics provided by some web hosts you can even drill down through the stats to the individual page where the link is broken, so you know exactly where to mend it.
It would be interesting to hear our visitors’ views on broken links and to what extent they are perceived to be a problem.
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