Broken Links: These are when you click on them but they either don’t do anything, or take you to a “page not found” error.
Bad Links: These are links that work, but don’t go where you had intended.
During a recent client website audit, I found that every single social media link went to a competitor’s social media. This happened because the website developer had built both business websites, BUT forgot to change the social media links when they built the 2nd site. While this is rare, I have seen it happen several times over the years.
Technically Bad Links: These are links that might still get you where the link was suppose to go, but are technically wrong. These are especially bad when it comes to internal links on your own website.
- www.YourURL.com VS YourURL.com (this causes too many redirects when you write one but mean the other – to search engines, WWW, ns non-WWW are 2 different websites)
- www.YourURL.com/blog/titleofpost VS www.YourURL.com/blog/titleofpost/ (the difference is subtle, it’s the forward slash at end), while this is technical – it’s important to get the exact full URL correct when linking
- http VS https – one is secure, one is not. However most websites will redirect you to the secure page if the website is https enabled. It’s very common to see old blog posts with http (no s), because that was the correct link at the time if writing the post or page.
Finding and Fixing links on a website is important for several reasons:
User Experience
Broken links can cause a poor user experience as they can lead to 404 error pages and prevent users from accessing the content they want. This can lead to frustration and a higher bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page.
Or worse, the visitor clicks a bad link that takes them to a competitor website (like I mentioned at the beginning.)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Bad & Broken links can negatively impact your website’s SEO by decreasing its authority and credibility in the eyes of search engines. This can lead to a lower ranking in search engine results pages and decreased visibility for your website.
Website Maintenance
Regularly checking for and fixing links is an essential part of website maintenance. It helps keep your website up-to-date and running smoothly, which can improve user engagement and increase the overall success of your website.
Accessibility
Broken links can also impact the accessibility of your website for people with disabilities who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers. This can prevent them from accessing important information on your website and lead to a poor user experience.
Check Links on Your Website
You can manually check all the links on your website, or there are numerous online tools available that can run a test for you. Be sure to not only check broken links, but ALSO find and fix bad links.
This can be overwhelming and/or time consuming, but a website developer or SEO expert can do this important task for you, including during your regular website audit.
In summary, fixing links is important for improving the user experience, enhancing website accessibility, and maintaining the credibility and ranking of your website in search engine results.