4 Reasons Broken Links are Harmful to SEO

In class, we talked about the importance of designing 404 pages that redirect users back to the homepage when they find a broken link on a website. 404 pages are great, but if a site has too many broken links, SERP ranking can decrease. Here’s three ways that broken links harm SERP rankings according to SEMRush.

Recency

One of the factors Google considers when determining a site’s ranking is recency. As we learned in class, when webpages get old, broken links occur. If a site has a lot of broken links, Google will assume that the site is old and therefore not as useful to users. Minimizing broken links ensures that Google considers content on your site to be recent and relevant.

“Crawl Errors”

Google’s “crawlers” are responsible for cataloging all of the webpages published to Google’s servers and ranking them on the SERP. If a webpage is a broken link, the crawlers can’t catalogue the page and give it ranking on the SERP. This lessens your site’s chances to rank for certain keywords or relevant topics. It doesn’t matter if your content is relevant to users if the page link is broken and can’t be ranked.

Linking

Google considers websites that are easy to navigate to be of higher value to users. Broken links make it more difficult to travel between pages on a site. Therefore, Google considers a site with broken links to be less valuable to users and will not rank the webpage high on the SERP.

So what?

The main goal of every site should be to satisfy and surpass the expectations of the site’s target audience. It can be difficult to meet this goal if a site is full of broken links that prevent users from interacting with that targeted content. Because broken links can harm SERP ranking, they can also limit a site’s reach to its target users. Keeping track of broken links is important so that content creators can ensure that they deliver quality content to their audience.