How To Fix Broken Internal Links

Good search engine optimization (SEO) includes having internal links in content every 200-300 words. However, those links can’t help your readers or your SEO if they don’t work, so you need to know how to fix broken internal links. 

Learn the steps for correcting this issue with this guide.

How To Fix Broken Internal Links on Your Company’s Website: 6 Steps

In six simple steps, you can make sure your site has functioning, SEO-boosting internal links.

1. Understand Why Links Break

Broken internal links send users to a nonexistent page on your site. When users click, the screen displays an error stating that the page no longer exists or that the browser can’t find it.

It’s easy to accumulate broken links when multiple members of your team contribute to and maintain your site’s content. A simple error can lead to a broken link that frustrates your audience and lowers the perceived value of your site.

The main causes of broken links are:

• Typo in the URL
• URL changed without setting up a redirect
• Page was deleted or removed
• Site migration changed page structures without updating links or adding redirects

Broken links may seem like a minor issue, but they can harm your SEO and ultimately tank your rankings on search engines. That’s because broken links make for a bad user experience. People will leave your site or stop using it altogether, hurting your SEO key performance indicators. 

Additionally, broken links make it difficult for web crawlers to examine and index your site. Plus, technical troubles tend to indicate that you have a low-quality site, which hurts your rankings. Therefore you must know how to fix broken internal links.

2. Find Broken Links

Manually checking page by page for broken links is impractical and inefficient. Hopefully, you’re already content marketing and publishing at least a couple of blogs weekly to build your visibility, so you’ll quickly have hundreds of URLs to check. 

Finding and monitoring links to your site is an SEO best practice, so you need to use software that simplifies that process. Your content management system (CMS) may already have plugins that can do that. Check through your CMS guides for integrated tools or add-ons that can locate broken links.

Otherwise, you can use SEO tools that audit your site. A few top choices we like are:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Semrush
• Screaming Frog
• Ahrefs

The Google tools are free but have limited functionality. Using the paid version of Semrush or similar software gives you advanced features and integrations with your CMS.

As you grow, you’ll eventually see the benefits of working with an SEO content agency to publish consistent content, manage on-page SEO, and build links. If you’re ready to hire an agency, ask for an SEO audit to find and fix broken internal links.

3. Use 301 Redirects

Often, the page still exists. You just need to send the traffic to the correct URL. One solution to the issue is a 301 redirect. 

The 301 redirect automatically forwards visitors from the old page to a new page. Consequently, the new page still gets the necessary page ranking metrics that improve SEO.

This strategy works well for pages you’ve deleted or moved permanently to a different URL. A common example is when you merge information from two pages with related content. You can send the traffic from both pages to the new one for a page with stronger ranking metrics. Likewise, you need this technique when merging or migrating sites.

However, don’t just send traffic to any page on your site, such as your home page or a generic landing page. If the information is irrelevant to the intent of the user, you’ll still upset your audience and harm your SEO.

4. Correct Links With Typos

If the problem is a single typo, you’ll find it more efficient to fix broken internal links by just correcting the misspelling instead of going to the trouble of creating a redirect. Either fix the text in the link or the page URL itself. Just be sure to test that it works after you update the text. 

5. Replace or Remove Outdated or Irrelevant Links 

If a page no longer holds value for your audience, you may need to delete it. Try to replace incoming hyperlinks with a more relevant resource, maybe even an external link, if it adds value to your reader.

If replacing the link isn’t practical, delete the link. Remember, redirecting to an irrelevant page only hurts SEO because you frustrate users, and your domain appears poorly structured to web crawlers. 

6. Prevent Broken Links in the Future

Even with helpful SEO tools, trying to fix broken internal links can eat up valuable time if you have a lot of them. Start by having a system of best practices for content creation and updates. 

Remind writers, editors, and developers to check that URLs work when creating, updating, or moving a page. If you’re deleting or merging pages, make sure the person responsible for content pruning runs an audit to find out which other pages link to the deleted page and then updates hyperlinks, removes them, or uses a 301 redirect.

As a best practice, regularly audit your site for broken links with your SEO tools. With software such as Semrush, you can automate scheduling and executing these audits. If you don’t have time for that, work with an SEO agency that handles on-page SEO and provides you with regular updates.

Fix Broken Internal Links and Improve On-Page SEO With BKA Content’s Help 

All of your web pages need on-page SEO and continual management for your digital marketing strategies to work. However, most small and mid-sized companies don’t have the necessary in-house resources or time. Fortunately, you can outsource these tasks to SEO experts. 

Instead of spending your precious time learning how to fix broken internal links and handling on-page SEO, partner with our pros, who can get it done quickly and correctly. Contact our SEO experts at BKA Content to see how we can streamline your team’s SEO strategy.