How to fix Broken External Links
How to fix Broken External Links This tutorial will show you how to fix broken external links. If you have this issue, open your PDF to your table of contents and find the name of the issue. You can go ahead and click on the name within the table of contents. It will take you directly to the page in question.
So here are the broken external links. If you scroll down, you will see a table at the bottom of this page.
If you had broken internal links as an issue on your site, this table is going to look familiar to you. This is essentially the same thing, except it’s a broken external link, which means that the broken link is going from your website to an external website, (some other website) and that link is broken. Whereas a broken internal link is a link from your website to another page within your site.
In the first column, let’s call it Column A, you’ll find the URLs that have the issue. What you’re going to want to do is go to these URLs and then look for the link to the URL over here in Column B.
We can see that the link in the first row has a status code of “404”, which is a missing page, which causes a broken link.
The first thing we’ll want to do is try to locate the link to this page. So the link we’re looking for is MMAglobal.com. Often a good way to find a link is just to do a search, and this shows us any text that includes MMA.
If we hover over this link, you can see in the bottom left-hand corner that this link is the one in question. If we go ahead and click on this link, we’ll see that it’s probably a “404”.
At this point, you’re gonna have to decide: Do you want to adjust this link? Can you change it? Or do you want to remove it completely?
If you can adjust the link and correct it, that’s often the best option. In this case, we can see that there’s just a typo in this URL. And if we go ahead and remove the closing parentheses at the end of the URL, this is most likely the page that was trying to be linked to.
So in this case, you would want to go into the page in Column A and adjust this link. Simply remove the closing parentheses at the end.
Another option if you want to adjust a link is to look for a page on the same external website that you might want to link to. Sometimes, if you’re linking to an internal page of another website, that website might change the location of a page, and give it a new URL.
That’s something you’ll just have to judge on your own. If it’s a situation where you can replace the link, as I said, that’s often the best solution.
However, often when I do this myself, my first step is just to remove a link. If a link is broken, I’ll just remove it and that will resolve the SEO portion of that issue. And then I can ask my client or my boss or whoever is in charge, ‘Hey, that link was broken so I removed it. Do you want to replace it?’ Then you can replace it with a link to a different page on the same website, a different site or whatever you like.
Why are Broken Links Important?
Broken external links are important for the same reason that broken internal links are important. While a broken external link is less important since you can’t control if/when other websites remove pages, the reason to avoid broken external links is almost the same as broken internal links which are explained below:
Why is it important to fix Broken Links?
Broken links are an extremely important issue for SEO and the reason is this: If you think about Google’s objective, what they are trying to do is send their users to the best websites possible.
They want to give their users a really good experience. That’s how Google has come to dominate the search engine world.
Now, if your website has a broken link on it ( I’m sure you’ve experienced this in the past), clicking on a link will lead to what they call a “404” error page.
And this is a glaring signal that you’re just not maintaining your site. You’re not keeping a watch over things, and Google does not want to send websites or send their users to websites that are not taking care of things.
That’s a sure way to lose some of their loyal users is to send them to sites that have errors within them.
So what you want to do is you want to keep Google happy––you want to play by their rules.
You want to make sure that your links are working. There are a number of technical issues and problems that you’ll encounter if not all of your links are working, but it’s fairly obvious and it’s pretty much common sense that your priority should be making Google happy. You don’t want to piss off your users either.
So fixing this issue (if you have it) is one of the most important things you can do for your SEO.
NOTE: When “Broken” Links appear to be working
One thing to note about broken external links, you may come across situations in which you see here (Column B), there are URLs that have been reported to be “404” and find that those pages are in fact working.
There’s a couple of reasons for this. Number one, the software that we use to check these websites is automated and what we call a “robot” which can be blocked by websites. Lots of website owners decide that they want to block any automated bots and only let active live users through to view the website.
A second possibility is this website, which is reported here as being a “404” but is actually working could have been down for a second. This page could have been down for a few minutes and when our software tried to check it, it was not available. That’s a possibility that happens more than you might expect.
And then thirdly, it could be that the URL is not a secure site. So this may have other technical issues that are blocking our software for some reason. All websites should have secure messages and they all should have HTTPS.
So if you come across this issue where you see URLs in this column here that are reported as “404” pages, but the links are actually working, you can go ahead and just ignore these. See if they reappear the following month — if they do, just let us know, and we will white list these URLs.