Stephen
Broken links on your website hurts your business in 2 ways:
1. It hurts your Google rankings (lower Google rankings = less booked estimates)
2. It looks bad to potential customers
Let’s dive into this more.
But first what is a broken link?
When a link is broken on your site it simply does not work. Let’s say you have a granite countertop link on your homepage and at some point that page changed, the link will no longer work. It may send a user to a 404 error page or somewhere else.
Why does this hurt my rankings?
It’s a rankings killer because it shows Google that your site isn’t up-to-date and also that “things” are broken on your site. You want your site to be 100% perfect in terms of functionality. Everything should work perfectly. If you send Google a signal that you have broken links, it will affect your rankings.
Looks bad to potential customers
To be brutally honest it looks horrible to have broken links on your site. Would you want to do business with someone that has a bunch of broken stuff on their website? I wouldn’t.
Luckily the fix is pretty darn simple and I’ll show you how below.
I LOVE this free tool and we use it on my clients sites plus on my own sites. I recommend you run this 4 times a year, once per season. It takes only minutes, let’s jump in!
Free backlink checker
1. Visit http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ and pop in your website
2. Click Find broken links and then fill out the security code
3. Select Report all occurrences of each dead link (may be slower) option
(If your site uses yoursite.com instead of www.yoursite.com the tool will tell you so you can fix it.)
4. The tool will crawl your site and list the broken links that need to be fixed. You’ll see something like this:
Here is what the columns mean:
#: number of broken links
Broken link: the link that is broken
Page where found: URL (the page where the broken link is) SRC (the place in the code where it’s broken)
Server response: the error given by from your server (most of the time it’s a 404 error)
How to fix your broken links
It’s pretty easy to fix your broken links. If you have a ton of them it could take some time, but do 10-20 a week. Do the following:
1. Run the tool and click on the URL link.
2. If you see the link, jump into your website and fix or remove the link.
3. If it’s hard to find, click on the SRC link and look at where it is in the code.
You want to point links to the correct page. If you no longer have that page, and don’t have a similar page on your site then just remove the link.
Let me know if you need help or have questions!
Interested in growing your countertop company? If so then let’s jump on a strategy call and I’ll give you a game-plan. Pick a time here.
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