This notification appears when the scanner detects one or more broken links on the page.
What Does “Checking And Fixing Broken Links” Mean?
Broken Links are URLs that lead to pages with server response codes 4xx or 5xx. It means that the outgoing link will not be available to the user, leading to a broken link.
A 4xx or 5xxx server response code indicates that the page is temporarily or permanently unavailable or banned for viewing. You can read more about the 404 response code and fix it in the Advanced SEO help from Google Search Center.
What Triggers This Issue?
This issue reports indexed pages that contain external links to URLs that return one of the HTTP response codes 4xx or 5xx. When visiting such a page, the user will not get the information he wants, and the search engine robot will get stumped on entering pages of the site into the index.
One broken link is unlikely to hurt your site, but a larger number of broken links may affect your search engine ranking.
How to Check the Issue?
Take advantage of tools for web admins and SEO audits for checking this issue. It can be either Google Search Console or other crawlers.
Wait until the site scan is complete and review the report to find issues. Usually, pages with broken links are marked by the crawler as critical to fix. Therefore, I recommend that you do not delay in fixing this issue.
Sitechecker scans your website, gathering information about issues and warnings within your domain. It can also be used to identify broken links.
Dig deeper into the issue to check internal and external links and their status codes.
Why is This Important?
Server response code 4xx or 5xx shows broken links. Such links on the website are bad for both the user experience and the search engines’ perception of the site. People can’t access the information they want. Search engine robots spend a crawling budget on dead-end pages and don’t crawl important pages on your site.
Read more about the impact of broken links on your site’s SEO and what harm it causes on the MOZ blog.
Discover details about pages containing links to broken pages!
Conduct a full audit to detect and fix all the URLs that link to broken pages.
How to Fix the Issue?
Depending on what server response code the page returns, you may be able to choose how to fix this issue.
- HTTP 404 (Not Found) means that the page may have been moved or deleted, but the link to it remains the same. You can restore the page with the old URL from the archive, remove the link from the original page, or replace it with a working page.
- HTTP 403 (Forbidden) indicates that the server settings deny access to the URL. To fix it, just check the server settings and give the correct instructions.
- 5xx (Server Error) indicates a possible problem with the server. It may be due to server speed, excessive load, or incorrect settings.
Check all potential weaknesses to avoid the appearance of indexable outgoing broken links on the pages of your site.
