How to Fix Broken Links

Broken links can frustrate users and make it harder for search engines to crawl your website.

Let's look at how to fix them.

Step 1: Finding 404 Pages

The first step in fixing broken links is to identify which pages are returning a 404 (Page Not Found) status code. Once you know which URLs are broken, you can take the appropriate action to fix them.

Check Google Analytics 404 Pages

A good starting point is Google Analytics, which can help you discover the 404 pages that users are encountering on your website.

Check your Backlink Profile

In some cases, users may be landing on broken links from other websites pointing to your content. Identifying these broken backlinks can be more challenging, as the data is often limited without a paid SEO tool.

I personally think ahrefs has the best backlink data of any provider. They do also offer a free Broken backlink checker to see a sample of your websites broken links.

Google Search Console

On your Google Search Console property you can see your top linked pages:

You can download these and test them to see if they show a 404 response. However, this data tends to be quite limited.

Other options on Google Search Console include looking at the page not found report:

You can also run this through URL inspection to see referring pages:

Lastly your can look at your crawl stats section for 404 responses here:

For these reports, while they aren’t necessarily pages with backlinks to them, Google will try to crawl pages that are linked from other websites meaning when these are flagged they can be good candidates to review.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Similar reports also exist on Bing Webmaster Tools also and in fact Bing does provide a more detailed backlink report showing more clearly the sites that link to your pages.

Crawl your website

Your website can be the source of many of your broken links. You can use Bings Site Scan tool to complete this, or for a small website sign up for the free version of Screaming Frog.

ahrefs can also show broken links

Step 2: Evaluate and plan steps

Once you have collated a list of all your 404 pages and links pointing to them you can begin evaluating for a plan of action.

Some things to consider for priority fixes are:

• Conversions - if the broken page or link is associated for your key conversion pages fixes could improve your conversion rate
• Views - if users are seeing 404 pages, they can be harming the experience
• Link Equity - when external links to your website are broken the link equity can be lost, reducing your authority
• Crawl Budget - a missing page is of not value to search engines, having links point to them is a waste of resources for them to be crawled.

Fix 1: Redirects

The quickest way to resolve a broken link, especially when you have multiple cases is to redirect the destination page which is showing a 404 response. This is a great solution when the page still exists but is at a differently named URL.

For high priority pages you can usually enact these within the CMS or through your server settings to migrate any users and link equity to the correct place.

Now the page no longer exists on your website, you can still consider a redirect to a similar page, however, this tends not to be the best experience for users and in a way you are tricking them by redirecting them to content they weren’t looking for. In some cases the new page could be comparable enough to satisfy users, so it’s down to you to make this decision.

One reason why many SEOs want to find a redirect target for removed pages is because they want to retain the link equity these pages have accrued. Search Engines are smarter now and redirecting pages to the home page or parent page can be detected and potentially do more harm than good. So again use your judgement to determine if the redirect is fairly used or more of a deceptive measure for SEO.

If you do decide to not redirect the 404 page, It may be beneficial from an auditing point of view to assign a clearer status code of 410 to signal the page is now gone. This means when you review your data you can know that the 410 pages have been evaluated for redirects already rather than repeating the process.

Fix 2: Recreate the page

Instead of redirecting to a similar page, or classifying as content that is gone from the website, you could consider recreating the content. If there is sufficent link equity and users are trying to visit the content maybe it’s worth having. Maybe you even removed it by accident, or forgot to migrate it when moving websites.

Hopefully when recreating a page, you will have some recollection of the content it had on it. If you don’t you can try reviewing the Wayback machine or other archving website to see if a snapshot had been taken to reference. Otherwise, you are going to have to use the URL, and context from links to determine what the page should be about and recreate it from scratch.

Fix 3: Amend the link

A final step regardless of whether you redirected the link is to look to amend the source links points to the page. Specifically if you left the page as gone from the website, you won’t want users to continue trying to visit it. For external websites, you can reach out to them to alert them of the broken link with your suggested amends .

For broken links on your own website the source pages should have been picked up from your crawl. You can go to these pages within your CMS and use indicators such as the anchor text or xpath to locate the broken links and fix them. When working through a lot of pages, it typically much quick to sort on source page in which you can sometimes resolve multiple at a time, rather than flicking back and fouth between the same set of pages when tackling the destination target of links.

In some cases, these links will not be accessible within your CMS and you will need to request a development fix, or if you are the developer make the update yourself within the underlining codebase.

Have a question on fixing broken links or SEO in general?

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