Because of this, it’s considered a good practice to clean up your broken and dead links to ensure all URLs are functional and intact.įor bloggers and businesses with hundreds or thousands of website pages, this isn’t as easy as it seems. They speak volumes about a website’s quality and the value it provides to visitors. Search engines see links as votes of confidence. Link rot – which is the tendency for links to eventually break down – is a significant issue in the industry.Īccording to one analysis, you can expect to lose roughly 25 percent of all links every seven years. Some websites have even gotten clever with their 404 messages, saying things like:īut as much as websites might make fun of their broken URLs, they can actually be quite problematic. While the hyperlink will look the same, clicking on the broken link will take you to a 404 Page Error or broken page Not Found message. You’ll know a broken link/dead link when you encounter one. The URL structure of the website has changed.The website has crashed and needs attention.A webpage was moved without a redirect being added.Some of the reasons why build links no longer work include: Broken Link Building: One Piece to the Larger Puzzleīy definition, a broken link – or a dead link, as some may call it – is a hyperlink on an internet web page that no longer works or functions as intended.An Effective Broken Link Building Process.

Ahrefs broken links