How to Find and Fix Broken Links at Scale

Internal links are hyperlinks that link assorted pages connected your ain domain. This way, you make a mode for some users and hunt motor bots to question done your site.

In fact, determination are aggregate benefits to interior linking.

Unfortunately, determination are galore challenges with interior links. One of those challenges is broken links. This occupation becomes much pronounced erstwhile your tract consists of thousands oregon millions of pages.
 

What Are Broken Internal Links?

A breached interior nexus is simply a nexus that points to different leafage connected your tract that doesn’t work.

So, what causes breached interior links?

Broken interior links tin beryllium unintentionally created for a fig of reasons:

• The leafage you nexus to doesn’t beryllium oregon was deleted
• The leafage you nexus to was moved
• There is simply a typo successful the link’s URL
• There was a alteration to the page’s URL but nary redirect was added

Recommended Reading: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet connected Internal Link Analysis for SEO

Why Are Broken Internal Links an Issue?

First, breached interior links make a antagonistic idiosyncratic experience for your tract visitors.

If a idiosyncratic clicks connected a nexus with 1 of the issues described above, they’ll spot a 404 page.

 This is simply a large mode to weaken the wide idiosyncratic experience.

Second, bots similar Googlebot usage links to crawl your website. And so, breached links prevent bots from exploring your pages. This tin effect successful a discarded of crawl budget.

After all, Googlebot won’t effort to navigate your website forever.

And past but not least, breached interior links forestall you from decently connecting each of your applicable pages into a cohesive topic cluster.

This means your pages and taxable clusters aren’t arsenic relevantly beardown arsenic they tin be. Plus, a leafage with nary interior links pointing to it astatine each is fundamentally stranded connected an island.

How to Find Broken Internal Links

There are 5 ways to find breached links connected your site:

1. Manually look for them
2. Chrome’s Inspect tool
3. Google Search Console
4. Spark on-page optimizer
5. An SEO level (we’ll show with seoClarity)

The Manual Approach

While the manual attack to locating breached interior links is a solution, it’s not a feasible solution. Especially for endeavor sites.

Chrome’s Inspect Tool

Right-clicking connected a webpage successful Google Chrome allows you to “Inspect” the page.

Google Search Console

Similar to the supra approach, you tin usage Search Console to find 404 pages.

Spark On-Page Optimizer

Spark is a escaped Chrome plug-in that offers instant page-level analysis, including a nexus checker.

It tin analyse the on-page SEO of immoderate webpage. Here’s the nexus checker portion:

(Use Spark to cheque a page’s rankings, usability, links, and more.)

SEO Platform

Auditing your interior links is important to locating errors astatine scale.  

An SEO level lets you bash conscionable that.

Thousands oregon millions of pages? No problem. Our crawler has been battle-tested connected tract crawls with much than 48 cardinal pages connected a azygous site.

Your SEO level should person an internal nexus analysis that lets you find 404 pages. This, arsenic we’ve seen, is simply a large mode to find breached interior links.

 
(Filtering to find 404 mistake pages.)

That elemental filter shows america each the pages with a 4xx leafage presumption code, allowing america to analyse further.

If a circumstantial leafage is showing a 404 and that leafage has inbound links, those links are considered broken.

(404 pages with their respective inbound links.)

In the lawsuit above, we’d privation to research the “Inbound Links” and either region them oregon edit them.

With that, let’s research however to hole breached interior links.

Recommended Reading: Common Internal Linking Mistakes successful SEO
 

How to Fix Broken Internal Links

Once you’ve located each of your breached links, you tin hole the occupation astatine the source.

You can:

• Redirect the link
• Update the link
• Remove the link

Redirect the Link

Adding a redirect volition assistance users and bots onshore connected the close page. Instead of uncovering that 404 page, the redirect volition bring them to a caller page.

This is simply a bully enactment due to the fact that you lone request to adhd 1 redirect for each URL. Once the redirect is added, it volition use to immoderate lawsuit wherever that URL is linked to connected your site.

Update the Link

You whitethorn besides privation to update the nexus wholly to bring users and bots to a antithetic page.

Remove the Link

Bonus: Fixing Internal Links astatine Scale

The 3 solutions mentioned supra volition lick the breached nexus problem, but this manual attack tin instrumentality a batch of time.

This, again, is wherever SEO tech comes successful to let for scale.

ClarityAutomate — a next-generation SEO platform — lets you update links with conscionable a fewer clicks. Even better, you tin bash each of the optimizations yourself, truthful your SEO task won’t person to beryllium successful the dev queue.

Whether the links are broken, redirects, oregon conscionable request to beryllium replaced, ClarityAutomate lets you update hyperlinks for a azygous leafage oregon astatine standard crossed an full site.

Conclusion

Broken interior links bash nary bully to users, bots, oregon your SEO program.

Luckily, with the close SEO tech, you tin find and hole the links each with a fewer clicks.