How Broken Links Will Chase Your Visitors Away and Hurt Your SEO Efforts
Search engines see links as a vote for a website’s quality. Links to your website and links within your website can affect where your website ranks in search results. Because of this, it’s best practice to either remove or update broken links.
Cleaning up broken links can add context to your website, improve user experience, and make content within your website easier for visitors and search engines to discover. On the other hand, websites with too many broken links can be a signal of low quality to search engines.
Internal Links
External Links
How to Check for Outbound Broken Links
Finding the outbound links that are broken is only half of the job, now it’s time to fix those links! This is the more time consuming step. Export your list from Ahrefs, and start chipping away at it. If it’s been some time since you’ve audited your outbound links, or you have never audited them, then you will likely have a lot to correct.
List of Tools to Check Your Website Brokens Links
| Tools | Ratings | Price | Free Version | Cool Features | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sitechecker | 5/5 | From 14$/month | Yes | The whole website audit, backlink tracker, keywords rank tracker, SEO monitoring. | Online Tool |
| SEMrush | 5/5 | Pro: $99.95/ month, Guru: $199.95/ month, Business: $399.95/month. | No | Performs deep link analysis, can check backlink types, links’ geolocation, etc. | Online Tool |
| Screaming Frog | 4.7/5 | From 149.00 EUR/year | Yes (Till 500 links) | Custom Search and Custom extraction with support of Robots.txt to check performance. | Desktop Application |
| Google Webmaster | 4.5/5 | Contact Google for Pricing. | Yes | SEO Optimization for most hunted websites on the Google | Online Tool |
| Dead Link Checker | 4.2/5 | From $9.95/month | Yes | Feature of Site Check, Multi Check and Auto Check. | Online Tool |
| Xenu’s link Sleuth | 3.5/5 | Free available without any subscription plans. | Yes | Good for Temporary network issue and supports SSL certificates and Site map. | Desktop Application |
| Ahrefs Broken Link Checker | 3.5/5 | From $99/month(Trial for $7 for 7 days) | No | Notice backlinks of competitor’s contents and display picture of Do-follow and No-Follow links. | Online Tool |
