Hello. 

I think (who am I kidding - I know) it was James Morrison who said “you can’t play on broken strings”.

If broken strings prevent a guitar from being heard, broken links on your website prevent…you can see where this metaphor is going.

Today I’ll be talking about why broken links are a problem and what you can do about them.

404 not found.

Ugh, we’ve all been there. You click a link, you get hit with a 404 error. The message usually looks something like this:

Nightmare material.

In fact, these pages are so common that many websites actually invest time, money and resources into making them look good. If you don’t have a cute, sad-looking cartoon robot on your 404 page, do you even have a brand?

But broken links aren’t just irritating for your potential customers: they can damage your site’s SEO too.

It’s a simple formula: the longer broken links are left in place, the more trouble they store up for your SEO efforts and website as a whole.

And let me tell you very clearly - you almost definitely have broken links on your website, chipping away at your SEO credentials as we speak.

How to fix broken links.

Woah there, hold your 404ses. To fix a broken link, you’ve got to find it. We regularly conduct site audits for our clients to hunt them down (plug alert: if you don’t have the time, will or expertise to do this, reply directly to this email with your website’s URL and we’ll give you a hand).

If you do want to do it yourself, use a tool like Ahrefs to make it easier.

Once you’ve found them, you should swap them for the right link (if you have it), set up a redirect, or remove the link altogether.

It’s as simple as that.

At this point, I’d show you a case study, but all you’d get is a picture of links that work. And that’s not exactly instructive, is it?

Until next time?

Do you have a question about broken links that we haven’t covered here? Reply to this email and ask away.

See you next month.

Seb at eCom for Humans