Broken link is the outbound link with access error. Outbound link can be a link that linking to others’ articles or blogs. When we write an articles, sometimes we may want to refer to others’ article and give it a link love, that’s called outbound link. When your reader want to visit the link and found that the link is dead and no longer exist, that’s called broken link.
Why Search Engine Spiders Hate Broken Links?
Search engine spiders crawl our pages very often to check any updates on our blog. Search engine spiders crawl every single outbound link as well if it’s do-follow attribute, unless you make it no-follow attribute.
When spiders crawl every outbound links in your blog and found that the links are dead, that’s mean you’re wasting their time to crawl your blog, most probably they will de-value the ranking on that page. When come to overall analysis, of course it will affect your search engine ranking as well.
How To Avoid Broken Links?
The impaction of broken links to search engine ranking is very serious. Broken links on your blog can get you to be penalized by Google.
1) Check Every Outbound Links In Period
Do a overall checking for every outbound links in your blog. Perhaps you can do a overall checking once a month. If you have tonnes of outbound links, it may take you a few days to check it. There is few broken links checker(i.e. Broken Link Checker), perhaps you can Google it up with the keyword “Broken Links Checker”.
2) Minimize Outbound Links
Try not to create too much outbound links within your blog, too much outbound links may affect your search engine ranking as well. Link exchange not the most important factor that improve your pagerank and ranking already, fresh, unique and quality content is the most important factor right now.
3) Add No-Follow Tag
Adding no-follow tag to your outbound links, that’s mean you’re asking search engine spiders not to crawl the links. It decreases the chances of getting broken links that crawlers hate.
Example : <a rel=”nofollow” href=”www.example.com”>Example</a>
Broken links can hurt your search engine ranking in long period, so be sure to check your outbound links once a week or month as shown in point #1. Of course healthy links can also help in improving search engine ranking, not to give double works to search engine spiders, it will treats you good in return as well.
About Lee Ka Hoong
Hi, i tried the dead link checker you recommend http://www.dead-links.com/, somehow it report many of my links included my inbound link were broken but actually work (especially tag link and categories links), any idea?
Slipper : Hmm, I suggest you to check your broken link by using a few broken link checker. You can simple search “Broken Link Checker” in Google, you’ll get a lot. Because nothing is 100% accurate, so we have to try in few ways to check.
Do let me know the result after check ya.
Btw, I have no broken link by using dead-links.com. =)
It’s weird, i found 100+ dead links in my website but actually none of them, thanks for your suggestion, i’ll try it out later :D
Slipper : Ops, perhaps you can try out by using a few broken link checker for accuracy purpose. Because some checker might have little error, so try to use few checker to check your broken link. =)
Broken links result in an unprofessional appearance that really takes away from a website’s quality.
TheCelebrityCafe : Yes, it obviously destroy your blog popularity and search engine ranking as well. Unless you put it as “nofollow” and search engine spider wont crawl it and they won’t know it’s broken. =)