If you’ve run a website for some time and you’ve done a fair amount of outbound linking, then you’ll likely run across some broken links at some point. Those are links that used to be good links, but when a website is taken off line, then they don’t point anywhere any more.
Why does this happen? There are a number of reasons.
- A business can go out of business. Their website is taken down and any links pointing to that domain are dead.
- The website owner could forget to pay their hosting bill. The web host will then discontinue their hosting account or take the site down.
- A webmaster could remove a specific page on their website and fail to provide a 301 redirect.
- Sometimes, server issues might causes temporary link breakages. These usually are no cause for permanent worry.
There might be other issues causing a broken link, but as a webmaster, you want to ensure that any outbound links on your website provide a value for your site visitors. That means you want to fix those broken links.
If you’ll go to Google Webmaster Tools, you can check your website’s diagnostics and Google will tell you if you have any broken links.
If you do have broken links, go to the page where that link is and find another resource somewhere on the web that you can link to instead. If you can’t find another resource, then rewrite the page so that the link isn’t necessary, or provide another type of resource for your visitors.
It’s fairly easy to replace broken links. The important thing is that you identify. Until you do, they’ll be dead weight for your website.
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