Don’t Let Dead Links Kill Your Website

While dead links may not actually "kill" your web site, they can kill your rankings in the search engines. And if people can't find your web site when they search for what you offer, your web site might as well be dead.

Links are what make the web work. In fact, the reason it's called "the web" is because links connect web pages like the threads of a spider web. Almost every web site relies on links. When you click on a button to go to another page on the site, that's an internal link. When you click on a reference that takes you to another web site, that's an external link.

What's a Dead or Broken Link?

A broken link is a link to a page that's not there anymore. An internal broken link may occur if you rename or move a page on your web site and fail to correct every link that points to it. Any link pointing to the old location is a broken link.

Internal dead links are your own responsibility, and taking care when removing, moving, or renaming pages should prevent them from happening.

External dead links are tougher to handle, because they don't occur as a result of anything you've done. You're linking to a page on someone else's web site, and you have no control over that web site. If they take down a page or move it, your link goes bad immediately. I used to have a link on my web site to an article I'd written several years ago for Entrepreneur.com. Eventually, that article expired and they removed it from their web site so my link to it became a broken link. This is a common experience for almost anyone who has external links on their web site.

How Do Broken Links Affect Your Web Site?

Most people understand that your web site's link popularity - the number and quality of other web sites that link to yours - affects where you rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. All other things being equal, a better link popularity will reward you with better rankings.

A little less obvious is the fact that outbound links from your site to other sites are also a factor in your rankings. But that's a little more complex. For example, if you link to a bunch of travel web sites, the search engines will reasonably think your site has something to do with travel (even if it doesn't really relate to travel.) If you link to a number of highly relevant and highly regarded web pages, that can enhance your reputation with the search engines. If you link to web pages with relevant keywords in your link text, that helps, too. But linking to lots of irrelevant or low quality web sites will hurt you.

If you link to pages that just aren't there, it makes your web site less trustworthy. It may imply that you're careless about properly maintaining your site. While many people know that Google measures your link popularity with a PageRank score, many aren't aware that search engines measure your trustworthiness with a TrustRank score. If Google finds a bunch of dead links on your site, can affect your TrustRank and in turn affect how well you rank when people search for what you do.

Another factor to consider is that human-edited directories provide very valuable links back to your website. But the fact that they are human-edited means that your web site is exposed to more scrutiny than it does in non-human-edited directories. If the editor finds a lot of broken links on your website, they may decline to list you. Clearly, it's important to avoid having dead or broken links on your website.

What to Do?

You really need to monitor your links periodically. One or two dead links aren't likely to cause you any noticeable problems, but if the number of dead links starts to climb, your search engine rankings may begin to drop.

There are services available that will check your links for you and report any dead links they find. They're convenient, reliable, and usually have a reasonable cost associated with them. If you have the time and the discipline to do it yourself, it's not very complicated. Simply go through every page on your site and click on every link that's there. If it doesn't take you where you intend, it's a broken link and you should fix it.

If you have more than a few pages on your site, that process may be more difficult or time-consuming than it sounds. If you find checking for broken links takes more time than you're willing to spend or if you don't remember to do it regularly (monthly is advisable) then you might want to explore having a service do it for you.

Keeping your site clear of broken or dead links means there's one less obstacle to great search engine rankings.