Web Design Experts » Seo » In the Name of SEO! Purge Those Broken Links

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In the Name of SEO! Purge Those Broken Links

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When Google first broke onto the search engine scene, they quickly established a new internet currency. In a bid to return more relevant search results, they began relying heavily on the quality, quantity, and indeed the anchor text of a link when it came to the ranking process.

The rest is history, as anybody who might've taken a passing interest in SEO
, will certainly know. Everybody is looking to beg, steal or borrow that one important link that could mean the difference between riding high upon the crest of an internet wave and quickly sinking without trace.

But amidst this clamour it is easy to forget that your own on-site links are also important; whether they are internal or pointing to other websites
.

An Ongoing Link War

With Google's ongoing war against search ranking manipulation via link-building practices having been cranked up to full-throttle, SEOs and Webmasters are looking more and more to the actual on-page factors, such as site structure and content, as a means to improving search rankings.

And it is with site structure that one particular issue can easily be overlooked. In your quest to have 99.9% of the internet linking to your website, have you considered the links on your own website and whether any of these are broken?

The Peril of a Broken Link

Broken links are links that point to an unavailable page. This might be because the page no longer exists, the URL has been misspelled, or the URL has changed but the link hasn't been updated.

Broken links pose a problem for the search engine spiders. These are the invisible robots that trawl the web, moving from one link to the next, and indexing the content they find there. Their job is paramount in filling the databases of the search engines and providing the end-user with the information they seek when they type a query into a search box.

Therefore it's necessary to keep these wee fellas sweet.

If you were navigating your way through a website and found that every other link returned a '404 Page Not Found Error', you'd be looking elsewhere fairly sharpish. Fact: Excessive broken links are a sure-fire way of driving away any visitors to your website.

But it isn't just the human visitors who'll be put off by these broken links. They can cause serious indexing issues for your website. If you want all of your web pages and content to be indexed by the likes of Google then your website has to be structurally sound and provide a trouble-free passage for these spiders to flow through.

Visualise the way water runs around your house, through a network of copper pipes. Obstructions such as airlocks or closed taps will prevent the progression of the water and this is what a broken link does. It stops the spider from reaching the place your website is directing it to.

A 404 error will be logged and referred to next time your website is crawled. If the link is still broken, then another error will be logged, and so on. It's like hitting a brick wall. If your site is returning too many of these errors, the search engine spider will soon get fed up and reduce the frequency with which it crawls your website.

Regularly crawled web pages are what count, and a nice fluid architecture that is friendly to both human and robot are imperative.

Addressing the Problem

There are a number of handy tools available to counter this problem. These can be either hosted or freeware applications. One of the best is the W3C's broken link checker, located at the W3C website.

It gives a page-by-page analysis of your website's links and, if encountered, details of any problems and a suggestion on how to resolve it.

Google Webmaster Tools will also give a rundown of any problems encountered upon the site, so make sure you sign up to that. All it needs is a blank html file uploaded to your server and your website will be verified and ready to go.

So what are you waiting for? Get checking.

Remember, it is a liquid site structure with minimal or no stop-start points that your website needs and what the search engines crave.

Article Source: Web Design Experts

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