Broken Links Lead to Broken Trust

The Frustration of Broken Links

This has probably happened to you. You are on a website and click on a link. Instead of seamlessly moving to the next page you get the annoying “PAGE NOT FOUND” error message. This is what is meant by the term “broken link”.

This is more than just an annoyance for the user. It is a frustrating experience that leads to negative feelings about that company. It’s like being disconnected when the person you are talking to on the phone attempts to transfer you. It’s an experience you want to avoid.

Your customers and prospects expect that the links on your website will just work. You want and need their trust. Sending them into deadends and disconnects will damage that trust that you worked so hard to build.

You can tell yourself it is no big deal and that they will return, but common sense says otherwise. Not only did the broken link drive away your potential customers, but your reputation was damaged as well.

The Basics of a Broken Link

A link on a webpage is how different pages or elements are connected. You may not even think about them until they don’t work. Anytime you click or touch on a link on a page your browser attempts to load the new page that the link references.

A broken link is a how we describe the scenario when the page (or resource) that the link references is not available. In other words, the link is pointed at something that does not exist. In the case of a broken link the user sees the broken link message (known as a 404 error) in their browser. This states the page you are looking for is no longer available.

The most common causes of the 404 Error (broken links) include:

• Deleting an entire web page, file, video or image
• A link to a page that has been removed from your website
• Moving your website to a new URL due to a change in domain names
• Outdated content
• Moving or renaming a page without updating your internal links
• Outside access is not allowed by the owner of the website
• Creating a link with an incorrect URL path
• Temporary links
• Making a typo during the creation of a link
• Linking to a nonexistent website
• Linking to moved or deleted PDFs, videos or images
• Changing the content management system for your domain

Other Ways Broken Links Damage Trust

Even one broken link can negatively impact your SEO. SEO means “search engine optimization”. For the purposes of this article we’ll simply define SEO as the level of trust that Google (and other search engines) have in your website. Search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are constantly crawling the web looking at pages, including yours. They are gathering information about your page so that they can display your website in search results that make sense. This is a good thing. However, if you have broken links, they will encounter them just like a user would encounter them.

The search engines are there to provide users with the most on-topic, relevant, useful and current content they can. In other words, they care deeply about the user experience...and broken links are a negative user experience. Although Google does not reveal exactly how they calculate their rankings, it appears that cleaning up broken links does have a positive impact on your rankings.

So, not only is that broken link a breach of trust with your actual visitors, it is a signal to search engines that your website is less-trustworthy.

Identifying and Fixing a Broken Link

Depending on how many pages and links your website has, this can be fairly simple. You can manually browse your website and click on all the links and make sure they do what you expect them to do. If you have any links that don’t behave as you want them to behave, you will need to fix them. This is something you will need to share with your webmaster who can help get them fixed.

Unfortunately, some websites have so many pages and links that it would be a chore to manually visit all the pages and follow all the links. It would simply be too time-consuming and too tedious. Also, just because you checked your entire website for broken links today does not mean that tomorrow things can’t change. The web is constantly updating and changing and if you are linking out to any external resources you will want to check them regularly. What you really need is an automated broken link checker that will check all the pages on your website on a regular basis to alert you of any broken links. That is where your B3 subscription comes in.

B3 Helps

B3 wants to help you be better and build trust. One of the benefits of your B3 subscription is that B3 checks your website regularly to identify broken links (and other common website issues). We regularly check your website and notify you if any broken links are found. This service also monitors your online presence and alerts you to inconsistencies in your other online profiles (such as Facebook, Google, Yelp, YP.com), monitors your online reviews, checks your website for spelling, uptime, and of course, broken links. We also help you see what keywords you are ranking for with Google.

Look for your monthly email from B3 with an update on the status of broken links (and other important online trust indicators). You can sign in to your B3 Account anytime to see the status as well.