A broken backlink is an incoming link that points to a page on the website that doesn’t exist. In other words, the link points to a page that has a “404” error on it.
In this post, we’re going to look at what broken backlinks are, how they are different from normal broken “links,” why they are harmful, and how you can find and remove them.
Let’s begin.
Explanation of broken backlinks
To understand what broken backlinks are, we first must understand two important concepts:
- What backlinks are
- And what broken links are
First off, backlinks are links placed on other websites that point to your website.If a website has a link on one of its pages that points towards your domain, it will be referred to as an inbound link for your site and as an outbound link for their site. “Backlink” is another name for “inbound link.” (If you want to learn more about backlinks, check out this post that we've have written by clicking on this link.)
Secondly, broken links are links that point to non-existent pages.In other words, the links are connected to the URL of a page that has been taken down.
Now that we have understood these two basic concepts, the idea of broken backlinks is very easy to grasp.
A broken backlink is an inbound link coming to your website that points to a webpage that doesn’t exist.
What happens when someone clicks on a broken backlink?
When someone clicks on a broken backlink, they are shown the 404 error page. This is what the 404 error page looks like on our website.
Broken backlinks are harmful to your website
Broken backlinks, like normal broken links, are harmful to your website. They can spoil the SEO-friendliness of your website and also ruin the user experience.
To sum them up, here is a list of the reasons why broken backlinks are bad for your site.
- They can lead to a negative SEO impact. When a backlink is placed on a website, Google’s crawlers (and other search engines as well) follow it to see the website that it points towards. If the crawlers find that the linked page doesn’t exist, it can lead the search engine to conclude that your website is not reliable. This can cause your rankings to drop.
- They can negatively affect the user experience.If a user finds a backlink pointing to your website and clicks it only to find it pointing to an error 404 page, it can spoil their experience. They may end up immediately clicking away from the website and not visiting it again.
As a result of these developments, you can end up losing traffic, getting a low SEO rank, damaging your brand reputation, and more.
How can you find and fix broken backlinks on your website?
Don’t worry about broken backlinks though, because we are here to help you out.
We will give you a step-by-step guide to finding and fixing broken backlinks on your website.
How to find broken backlinks on your website
- For the first step, you have to identify the 404 pages on your website. To do this, you can visit the Google Search Console and navigate to the “Pages” tab. Here is a screenshot of this process.
- Once you are at the “Pages” tab, you will be able to see the pages that are not indexed on the SERPs due to having a 404 error. You can see it in the screenshot below.
- After that, you can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to see all the backlinks pointing towards those 404 pages. In the screenshot below, you can see that we’re using the free Ahrefs backlink checker for this purpose.
In this way, you can easily find broken backlinks on your site.
How to fix broken backlinks on your website
Now let’s talk about how you can fix all the broken backlinks that you find on your website.
- Add a redirect. One way to fix broken backlinks on the website is to add a redirect. You can redirect the nonexistent 404 page to an existing one. That way, you will be able to pass the link juice to the new page and also the incoming traffic.
- Ask the backlinking website to change the URL. You can also get in touch with the website that is providing the backlink, and tell them to change the URL so that the link points to another page.
Populate the page again. If the page currently points to a 404 page, you can change the page and make it live again. You can add content to the page so that it does not remain a 404 anymore.
Final thoughts
And there you have it.
Broken backlinks can be harmful to your website due to different reasons. In this post, we have talked about what they are, how you can find them, and the steps you can take to get rid of them.
If you follow the steps mentioned above, you will be able to improve the SEO friendliness of your website along with its user experience.