Two new features have very recently been added to Ahrefs Site Explorer — Incoming Broken Links Checker and Outgoing Broken Links Checker. The first one helps you find external sites that link to pages of your site that don’t exist. The second feature helps you to assess your own site’s outgoing links, and find out broken outgoing links with ease. These features may sound simple, but they have the potential to significantly increase your organic traffic, even overnight, if you never bothered about broken links to and from your site before. Curious to know how? Read on.

Turning Broken Incoming Links into Real Links

To find out broken incoming links to your site, you simply need to open Ahrefs, and enter your site’s domain name in the Site Explorer bar and hit enter. After that, on the Site Explorer dashboard, you can find ‘Broken Backlinks’ on the left sidebar under ‘Inbound Links’. You just need to click on that and you’ll be presented with all the broken inbound links that Ahrefs has found so far.

I wanted to try the feature as soon as it was launched, so I went ahead and tried it for my SEO blog, TechTage. Here’s the result:

Within 10 seconds of looking at the 5 broken inbound links, I found one coming from this post that had a broken link to my guide on increasing domain authority. I had a quick look over the stats of that referring domain and it was quite a powerful domain, having an Ahrefs Domain Rank of 46 (TechTage itself has an Ahrefs Domain Rank of 56, for comparison). I decided to contact the webmaster of the site through their contact form, notifying them about the broken link. As they were genuinely trying to link to my content anyway, they should have no problems replacing the broken link.

If you have a site with much more content than TechTage (it doesn’t have a huge number of posts, though the average length of posts is quite a bit compared to other blogs), chances are that you’ll find much more convertible (broken links that can be fixed) broken inbound links to your site than one.

So, using the feature to assess the inbound link profile of your site. You can spot numerous broken links that are easy to turn into proper links and instantaneously boost the link metrics of your site and gain an immediate edge in the SERPs.

Fixing Broken Links on Your Own Site

Broken links are never a good thing to have on your site. They are one of the many negative factors that Google Panda considers before penalizing your site. Thus, having as little amount of broken links on your site as possible is ideal for optimum on-site SEO. Finding on-site broken links is especially hard for large sites or sites that don’t use a platform like WordPress which offers plugins to check broken links automatically.

Ahrefs Outgoing Broken Links Checker comes to your rescue, as no matter what the site platform is, as long as AhrefsBot can crawl your site’s pages, it can also find and report broken links.

The tool additionally provides you the exact pages on your site containing the broken links, the anchor texts of those broken links, and the actual broken links, so that you can quickly edit those pages of your site and either remove or fix the broken links with minimum effort. This practice is part of a regular site maintenance that will protect your site from future Google Panda or any other algorithmic updates that target poor site quality. If your site is currently penalized by Panda, it’ll ensure a positive step towards recovery when the next Panda refresh rolls out.

What do you think about these two new features of the Ahrefs Site Explorer? Leave your opinion in the comments section below.