Inbound Links & Broken Links

Inbound Links

Inbound links - links to your website from external websites - tell Search Engines that there is content on your website that others are interested in sharing. This is an important element for Search Engine Optimisation as it is an indicator that your site has quality content.  Ensure your website is listed on any local business listing websites, including "Google My Business". You can also ask and affiliate companies you work with if they would be happy to share a link to your website.

How broken links can hurt your website

One of the key things that can quickly turn viewers away from your website is broken links. Broken Links are usually displayed as a page with a "404: page not found" error message.

Broken links not only have a negative impact for the viewer but they can also impact your SEO and search engine page rankings.

Check your site regularly for broken links

It is recommended that you check for broken links regularly to review and fix any broken links that may have occurred when editing content or moving, deleting or renaming any pages or folders within your website as any links that were pointing to of from those pages may have been affected.

Internal Links or 'Hyperlinks' are how you navigate from one page to another inside your website. It's important that these links are working and are linking to the correct page or website in order to make sure visitors to your website are being taken to the correct information when they click on them.

External Links are hyperlinks that point at any page on a domain other than your websites domain. It is important to check and update these regularly for maintenance purposes. Because the pages being linked to don't sit within your site they wont show up in your 'Broken Links' checker in Web Manager. The page may be removed or the URL path changed over time without your knowledge which can result in the link opening a broken page (404 Page not found).

Avoiding Broken Links

If you need to permanently change the URL of a page on your website but don't want it to appear as a broken link when people are trying to access it using the previous URL, it is recommended that you make a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect basically means anyone trying to visit the old URL for a page will be automatically redirected to the new page URL - avoiding a 404 'Page not found' error.

Fixing Broken Links

If you discover broken internal or external links within your website fixing them is easy in Web Manager. We cover them off in the steps below.

Dead Link Checker

Don't want to click on each link one by one? you can use this handy online dead link check: http://www.deadlinkchecker.com/website-dead-link-checker.asp

Note: Click the link under "Source link text" to be taken to the page where the broken link is located.

TIP: When we setup your website we included an "Internet (or Useful) Links" page. This is usually placed as a sub-page of  "Resources (or Client Tools)". As a result changes on those websites over time, your page contains links which are out of date or broken. We advise going through each of the links to see if they work, we also advise that the link opens in a new tab for better usability.

Quick Tip: It's good usability for a link to an external page to open in a new tab so the user doesn't get taken away from your website, to do this you can set the "Target" to "New Window".