
So, some people made the assumption that broken links aren’t that big of an issue. Googlebot isn’t going to lose sleep over broken links :). The web changes, sometimes old links break. Do redirected links cause ranking issues? Google’s John Mueller once addressed the question: It is unfortunate that many webmasters, marketers and business owners only view broken links as a nuisance rather than a larger problem. If you know what causes broken links, you are also less likely to make those mistakes in the first place.īy lessening the chance of a link breaking from the outset, you are reducing the chance that they will harm your website down the road.
#FIX BROKEN LINKS AND PROGRAMS FREEWARE HOW TO#
The obvious reason is that if you know why a link is broken, you will know how to fix it. Understanding why a link is not working is just as important as finding it in the first place. Perhaps it was open at one time but now sits behind a paywall. Remember, not everyone makes their content accessible to the rest of the web.

Regardless of who is to blame, broken links are caused by errors that include:

Some are the fault of the webmaster and others are the fault of the websites a link is pointing to. There is a number of things that cause broken links. This term describes websites with an abundance of broken links. When a website has not checked for broken links and fixed these dead links for a long time it suffers from link rot. This page will tell you that the webpage or file you are looking for is not available.

When the link is broken you receive a 404-page error instead.
#FIX BROKEN LINKS AND PROGRAMS FREEWARE PDF#
When you click on a link you expect to visit another webpage, view an image, open a PDF file, etc. Quite simply, a broken link is a link that doesn’t take you to the expected resource.

Technopedia defines a broken link as, “ a hyperlink which is linked to an empty or non-existent external webpage.” Broken links are also called dead links. However, before we dive any deeper it is important to understand what a broken link is. Some of the bigger companies had numbers even higher than that: The average number of broken links per site was 2.4%. In a test run against a subset of the websites of the S&P 500, Link Tiger found that all of the sites had broken links. The information provided here will help you make sure that there are no broken links on your site and help you deal with broken links that should be bringing visitors to your site. This short article will help you understand what broken links are, what causes them, the harm they do, how to find them and then how to fix them. Imagine finally finding the information you need only to be denied because of a broken link. Not only are broken links bad for a number of reasons, but they frustrate visitors. So, if links are broken, a visitor has no way of moving to the other resource. Essentially, the web is named as such because of the ability for pages and sites to link to other sources and relevant information.
