Are broken links messing with your search engine rankings?

If your site has a lot of broken links, it gives your visitors the impression that your site isn't maintained properly. It also presents an issue with search engine bots from crawling your entire site when they discover broken links. Furthermore, you end up losing visitors, and you lose out on search engine rankings because you have links that are broken!

Your web server responds with a typical 404 status error if it detects a broken link. Search engines have evolved over the last few years and link validity plays an important factor for search engine rankings. The more broken links your site has, the less trust your site acquires with the search engines. Therefore, your pages end up not ranking very in the SERPs, and you also end up driving visitors away!

If we look at Google's web design guidelines, we will see that it advises webmasters to check their site for broken links. search engines, focus mainly on providing a good experience for the end user with by providing quality pages. Therefore, broken links degrade the overall quality of the site and produce an unwanted effect for search engines and your visitors.

Overall, broken links can prevent you from being listed in directories such as, DMOZ and Yahoo! Furthermore, it sends out a very bad message to webmasters that discourage them from linking to you.

You want to avoid having broken internal and external links. Furthermore, it is advisable to check your links regularly and update/remove them as needed. I strongly suggest using the "broken link checker plugin" if you are a WordPress as your blogging platform.

The broken links checker plugin for WordPress, is easy to install, and it automatically checks for broken links. If it encounters any broken links, they are displayed on the dashboard where you are given some options to remove or edit the link.

Broken links create a bad experience for the end user and the search engines. Make sure that you are on top of the game and check for broken links. You may want to check them manually or use a plugin to handle them. It will help keep your visitors on your site and also to rank your site higher in the search engine rankings.

Hope this blog post was helpful to you, "Are broken links messing with your search engine rankings?"

Spunky Jones.

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