Video: How To Find Broken Links And Broken Backlinks That Hurt Your SEO

If you’ve ever been doing SEO for your site, you know that it’s a long and tedious process.

Pick the best keywords,
write great content,
build quality links…

…it makes me cringe when I think about doing all that work for a brand new site.

That’s why a lot of people fell into the traps of scammers so eagerly.

When someone tells you that you can avoid all the hard work and rank #1 by tomorrow morning, you really want to believe him. Because if you don’t – you’re doomed to all that had work in front of you.

I am not a scammer and I will never promise you any “magic SEO trick” that will boost your rankings instantly.

However, I can share quite a few “quick wins” that might visibly improve your website’s performance in Google.

And one of them is:

Fixing Broken Links And Broken Backlinks

NOTE: if you’re enjoying my “Oversimplified SEO” series I invite you to subscribe to Ahrefs YouTube channel.

Here’s a quick recap of what I talk about in this video:

Broken Link is when a page on your site is linking to some other page, that does not exist.
Broken Backlink is when some other page is linking to a page on your site, that no longer exist.

Both of them are bad for you and thus have to be fixed:

Broken Links decrease the chances of your page to rank, because Google knows that you’re linking to outdated resources and values your page less.
Broken Backlinks don’t path any authority to your site, because the pages that they link to no longer exist.

So just use Ahrefs Site Explorer tool to find and fix both of them.

In most cases you’ll see an improvement in your overall search traffic once you do that.

That’s it!

Hope you enjoyed the video.

Let me know if there’s something you’d like me to tackle in the next episode of “Oversimplified SEO”.

Calin Cristian

From my experience, almost every time you will find the same or any other relevant content on your website before redirecting to root domain.

The first thing you should look is if the content still exist on the website with a different URL or maybe moved to another category/section.

Starting with the example given by Tim Soulo, you could easily find the old content with a Google search by URL or by title. And it took me about 5 seconds to find the exact same content on this URL: https://blog.ahrefs.com/ahrefs-is-going-to-close-keywords-analysis-on-11-january-2013-it-will-be-totally-free-for-all-till-that-time/

If your page is permanently gone, or you don’t want it anymore on your website, you should find a related page to point your URL redirect, because as we know 301 redirects pass authority and link juice from the old pages.
- http://bloggerjet.com/ Tim Soulo
  
  very nice point Calin!
  
  if there’s a piece of related content that you want to rank well – you can redirect your broken link to that page
  
  Thanks!
http://www.graphicspath.com Graphics Path

It was really an informative article. I am new in seo process and i am eager to learn more about seo in order to improve my seo skills and the ranking of my site. Please give me some advice so that i can take a straight path.

Fixing Broken Links And Broken Backlinks

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