There are two tools which I use regularly. The good news is yes, you can check your site for broken links yourself. If a customer can’t find what they are looking for on your website then they are highly likely to leave and not come back, and may end up going to your nearest competitor for the information instead so having broken links can really harm your business reputation as well as your website. It’s bad to send customers (and the Google bots) to broken pages as both will have a negative impact on your site experience. This is why it’s really important to avoid linking out to broken content, and to avoid having pages on your own site which are broken. But if it turns out to be an error page due to a broken link, they will be left disappointed and potentially less trusting of you as your site let them down. Visitors who follow links (which either lead to or from your site) clicked on the link for a reason – they are expecting to see the content behind the link and are interested enough to read it. How do broken links affect customer experience? The last thing they want to do is send users to sites that have broken links.

This is because the Google web crawlers, or bots, trawl your site to collect data for your ranking. However, it’s really important that you do check because if your site has a lot of broken outbound links then it can have a negative impact on your SEO. Why do broken links harm your SEO?Īny links you have which go out to other sites, are called outbound links and it can be tricky to keep track of these as you don’t have any control over the pages so might not realise the page you are linking to has been removed. Unfortunately with links to external sites you have no control over what happens to that content.Īnd it can cause immense problems for your business reputation as customers don’t like being sent to broken links and they are unlikely to come back to your site if that happens to them. This can happen for a number of reasons – the content has been moved or archived, or the name of the page has changed, or the website has closed down. If the link is broken, when a visitor clicks on it they will most likely see an error page telling them that page no longer exists. What are broken links?Ī broken link is either a link you have included which goes out to content on another site, or a link to a page within your own site. Broken links are one of the most annoying things when it comes to good customer experience on a website – you don’t want to put your customers off and you don’t want to damage your SEO rankings so checking broken links needs to be part of your routine website maintenance.

How to fix broken links on blogger