Links
How to fix broken links to other sites
Some of your links to other sites are dead. They are a dead end for readers, and a lot of them signals a page nobody has kept up in a while.
What it is, and what it costs
External links break when the site you linked to moves or shuts down. Readers who click them hit an error and leave your page, and a page full of dead outbound links reads as neglected, to visitors and, over time, to search engines judging quality.
How to fix it
Update each link to the resource's current address, point it at a working alternative, or remove it. For references that may have moved, an archived copy (web.archive.org) is a stable fallback.
How to check your site
Crawl the site and check outbound links for non-200 responses.
Related: broken internal links, which are usually the higher priority.
Questions people ask
- Should I nofollow external links?
- Only where you do not want to vouch for the destination (paid or user-generated links). A normal editorial link to a good source is fine to follow.
Does your site have this?
Check your site to find dead links to other sites.
See also
- How to fix title tag problemsThe title tag is the line people read in search results, and the strongest single signal on the page about what it is for. Four things go wrong with it, and a site with one of them usually has two. Each is below, with what it costs and how to put it right.
- How to fix meta description problemsThe meta description is the sentence under your link in search results. It is not a ranking factor, which is exactly why it gets neglected — and it is what decides whether anybody clicks the result you worked to earn. Three faults account for almost all of it.
- How to fix H1 heading problemsThe H1 is the visible heading that tells a reader — and a search engine — what a page is about before either goes any further. Three faults are common, and a template is behind most of them, which means one fix usually clears the whole site.
- How to fix canonical tag problemsA canonical tag names the real URL for a page when the same content is reachable more than one way. Getting it wrong is quieter than most SEO faults: nothing on the page looks broken, and its value quietly goes to the wrong address — or to one that cannot rank at all.