SEO Blog Audit Guide Step 6: Broken Links

In my complete guide to conducting an SEO audit, I taught you how to test various parts of your website to see what improvements can be…

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SEO Blog Audit Guide Step 6: Broken Links

In my complete guide to conducting an SEO audit, I taught you how to test various parts of your website to see what improvements can be made in regards to SEO. Now I’m going to go through each step in more detail so you and see why these issues are important and what we can do to fix them. Next up is how to fix broken links.


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SEO Blog Audit Guide Step 6: Broken Links

STEP 6: CHECK FOR BROKEN LINKS

You might have the link checker Plugin installed and think you can skip this step. Hold up! Get over to Broken Link Checker and scan your site. Look how many I had!

broken links seo for bloggers

That’s embarrassing!


What are broken links?

Broken links are links the links you put in blog posts that direct to a page that no longer exists. These are common in things like:

  • products on a clothing website
  • discontinued items
  • blog comments where the blogger has deleted their website

I find a lot of my broken links are due to comments. People have left a link to their website while commenting on my blog. As my website is 6 years old, a lot of these bloggers no longer exists!

Why are broken links bad?

The short version is that they are bad because they pull down the quality of your site.

For humans visiting your site, it can be frustrating if they click a link and it doesn’t go anywhere. It can lead to people not sticking on your site. If you’re a business, it can make you appear unprofessional and could even make you lose sales.

Google is all about showing the best quality websites in search. Showing the best quality is important to keep Google up there as the top search engine. So when Google crawls your site and comes across broken links, it’s a big indicator that your website might not be relevant, useful and update.

You can get the WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker which will scan your site, tell you which links are broken and allow you to unlink or change the link if needed. It’s dead quick and dead easy.

The sad thing is that it isn’t great at catching every link. I recommend you also put your website through Broken Link Checker. Here you can scan your site – which can take a while, so get a cuppa, then come back and look at the results.

There’s no easy way about it, it’s just a case of going through each link and removing them.

Make it a quarterly task to go through your broken links to prevent it becoming such a massive task.

Wish me look on removing my 800-and-odd links!

One comment

  1. You know I’ve never thought about it that way, but obviously all the comments from bloggers who deleted their blogs are broken links. I need to remove them. Same goes for linking items that are no longer in stores, right?

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