Content
Broken links are frustrating for users and leave a poor impression. If a company can’t even maintain its own website, what does that say about their work?
The reality is different, of course. Websites are complex and grow over time. It’s easy for a page to be moved without updating the links. Typos happen more quickly than you think, especially when there’s no time for a final review of a new article, leading to double the frustration later.
Users and potential customers don’t consider this. They expect the website to work and quickly become frustrated when they land on an error page.
For this reason, regularly checking your website for broken links is an important part of website maintenance and should be automated whenever possible.
Why Broken Links Matter
Beyond frustrating users, broken links have deeper negative impacts on your website. Links are useful not only for people but also for search engines. Search engines like Google use links to index your website and understand the relationships between content.
If a website has many broken links, it complicates the indexing process and may lead Google to deem the site less relevant. In the worst case, this lowers the perceived quality of your website, causing Google to show it less frequently in search results.
Content quality is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization (SEO). Since “quality” is a broad term, it encompasses many factors. Broken links are just one of these factors, but they are easily fixable, making it very unfortunate to suffer a disadvantage because of them.
Reasons for Broken Links
How quickly can links break and how does it happen? Here are the three most common reasons why links on a website can break:
- The page was moved: The page was moved and the link(s) was not updated. This can happen quickly with blog articles that are renamed, as well as with detail pages for services or a career page that are linked in many places and where a link can easily be overlooked.
- A Typo: A typo happens faster than you think, and suddenly “/privacy-policy” becomes “/privacy-polcy”.
- An external page was changed: External pages can also change, and a useful link suddenly leads to nowhere. These changes are particularly bad because they can happen at any time without notice.
We have encountered all three of these reasons over the years. Even if you are as careful as possible, if you update your website daily or weekly, you will eventually make a mistake. The only real solutions is using monitor your website and check for broken links.
Checking Your Website for Broken Links
Even for smaller business websites, manually checking all links is no longer an option. It is a tedious manual process that costs time and nerves. During this time, you could be focusing on much more important tasks.
Therefore, you should start using professional solutions early on. There are already many useful and even free tools available that can check your website for broken links.
1. Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is primarily designed for website owners to control how their site appears in Google search results. However, it also offers the ability to check your website for broken links.
To check for broken links using Google Search Console:
- Sign in to your Google Search Console account.
- Select your website property.
- Navigate to ‘Coverage’ under the ‘Index’ section.
- Look for errors labeled ‘Not found (404)’ among the non-indexed pages.
- Click on the error to see the affected URLs and if necessary take action to fix them.
There can be valid reasons for 404 pages, such as when a page is intentionally deleted. However, regularly checking this list is still worthwhile to identify problems early.
What is Google Search Console?
Every business should set up Google Search Console as soon as their website launches. It is an essential tool from Google to ensure your website is correctly displayed in Google search results and to identify problems early.
In Google Search Console, you can:
- Index your website and subpages: Instead of relying on Google to find your website, you can manually submit your sitemap or individual URLs.
- Announce changes and new pages: You can notify Google of new pages, articles, or changes and request faster indexing. Without this manual request, it can take days for Google to recognize the changes on its own.
- Identify issues with your website: The Search Console shows why certain URLs are not appearing in Google. This can include incorrect redirects, missing metadata, or broken links.
- Monitor your website’s performance in Google search: The Google Search Console provides information on which searches display your website’s pages and how often they are clicked.
To use Google Search Console, simply sign in with a Google account on the Search Console webseite and verify your website. Verification can be done through various methods, such as embedding a code in your website or adding a DNS entry.
2. Free Tools
A simple tool for quickly checking individual pages is linkpublishers.com. However, since it only allows checking individual URLs, it is not suitable for larger websites.
An alternative for quick checks is deadlinkchecker.com. Deadlinkchecker.com has been around for many years and offers a good free option to check individual pages or your entire website for broken links. The tool may look a bit outdated, but it gets the job done. It also offers a paid version where you can automate regular checks.
An interesting alternative for scanning the entire website is error404.atomseo.com. After entering your domain, this tool crawls your entire website in a few minutes and generates an online report. The paid version offers the ability to automate crawling and regularly check your website.
3. SEO Audit Tools
Since broken links are also an SEO problem, many SEO tools offer the ability to check your website for broken links. One example is neilpatel.com. Neil Patel has been in the market for many years, and his SEO audit tool is popular among marketing experts.
The free version is sufficient for an initial check of your website and is very user-friendly. Additionally, it offers other features, such as optimizing keyword usage or comparing your site with competitors. However, the paid subscription is geared towards SEO agencies and e-commerce businesses, making it too expensive and powerful for many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). If you need this level of support, you should consider hiring a specialised agency
4. Using Your Own Python Program
If you prefer not to rely on external tools and have programming skills, you can write your own Python program. We have developed a program that checks your website for broken links.
This program crawls your website and finds all internal and external links, phone numbers, and email addresses. These links and details are then individually checked, and a report is generated. The advantage is that you can run this program as needed without being tied to a subscription.
The program is open source and can be viewed and customized for your own business on GitHub.
Python program for finding broken linksWe use this program to automatically check our own website and the websites of our clients. If you’re interested, we can also assist you in monitoring and maintaining your website.
Conclusion
Broken links on your website are more than just an annoyance and should be taken seriously. They leave a poor and unprofessional impression on users and can even harm your SEO performance in the long run.
Links can break faster than you might think, not just because of typos. Regular checks are important and, fortunately, easily done with the free tools mentioned above.
Don’t have time to maintain your website? Our experienced team is here to help you build and maintain your business website. Contact us now for a free consultation!