What is Broken Link in SEO?

Broken link (Broken link) is a type of link that negatively affects the SEO results of a website. This is also one of the popular link forms, especially for websites with incomplete page structure.

1) Broken link is what?

Broken link is also known by other names such as breaking links, link death, dead links or link rot. The term in SEO describes the status of links when pointing to a web page, a server that no longer exists on the Internet.

It can be understood simply that all the links that users cannot access can be called broken links. The returned HTML status code of these links is usually in 4xx format, such as a 404 access error .

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2) Broken Link's influence on the website:

Broken link blocks bot activity

When a bot follows a broken link placed from a website outside of your website, it will not be able to continue crawling the data on that site and other sites on the site because of what it receives. just a white website with no information. Thus, the process of crawling and indexing website data has been stopped by broken links.

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Reduce the ranking of the website

Google always does everything to increase the user experience with the results this tool returns for their queries. While broken link is one of the reasons that seriously reduces the user experience, and this tool also has great support in webmaster tool to manage broken links on the page.

This is why 404 pages suddenly dropped rankings. Even, the ranking of the website will be reduced if there are too many broken links on the site.

Broken link's effect on user experience

When you see a broken link on the search results table, users will immediately exit the page with that broken link and move to the next result in the search results table. Thus, they will not have any good experience on the site and initially have a bad impression on the website. What they remember about the website now is just a domain name with many broken links.

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Reduce website revenue

Not only does it lose the conversion from customers who exit the website immediately, the website also faces the risk of reducing revenue from friends of those customers. A study by Kissmetrics showed that about 44% of US users will share their bad experiences about a website for their best friends.

3) Causes of Broken link:

1. The site structure may have been changed, changing the path structure on the page, causing all pages on the site to be changed paths.At this point, the old links on the page will become broken links.
2. Some news sites (especially foreign newspapers) turn the public mode of a content into a paid mode or need to log in to be able to view, making all sources of other sites About these articles will become broken links.
3. The link has expired (outdated).
4. The frequent changes in the privacy of posts on social networks, making the links citing this article become broken link.
5. Links containing a user's temporary information (such as access session data or login data) will become broken links for other users because this information is not publicly available. rate.
6. Users are blocked by content filters or firewalls.
7. The reason that the equipment structure changes is one of the most dangerous causes and generates the most broken links.

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Refer to the following articles:

1. SEO website process on Top Google

1. The terms need to know in SEO

1. 10 Google search tricks anyone needs to know

Hope the above article is useful to you!