The SEO tool provider Semrush conducted a study to measure the frequency and cause of broken links. 150,000 randomly selected websites were analyzed for this, as well as 175 million individual pages and 15 billion links.
Surprisingly, almost half of all websites analyzed (42.5%) had internal links that were not fully functional. This suggests that companies are not doing enough to revamp their own website.
Evgeni Sereda, Marketing Manager at Semrush, said it was an easy task to fix broken links quickly. It’s a pity for companies, because valuable potential is lost in the process. According to Sereda, backlinks in particular help websites to gain more authority, which in turn means that Google promotes the websites further up in the search results.
For this reason, we show here the five most common errors and how to fix them:
- Broken links
Probably the most obvious problem is that, broken links. The reason for this is often a faulty URL or the fact that the linked page no longer exists. Website errors like these are rated directly by Google in the quality rating and the websites lose relevance as a result, and in the worst case they end up further down in the search results. It is important to check regularly whether the links are all still fully functional. - Referrals
Less than 20% of all websites surveyed referred to websites in the correct way in their sitemap, with no internal links used. Only pages with valuable content should be placed in the sitemap here. Less valuable pages should simply be deleted from the sitemap. - Internal Links
It is also important to include enough internal links that point to a page so that search robots and users can find them. The more links point to a page with important content, the more relevant this page becomes. - Redirects
When it comes to redirects, it’s always better to stick with too few than too many. The train of thought to replace old URLs with a new URL using a 301 redirect is logical and simple, but these are no longer taken into account in the indexing when there are a majority of Google’s search robots. - Crawl Depth
Another mistake is too high a number in the crawl depth before the user is even forwarded to the page he wants. The more clicks it takes to get from one page to another, the less likely it is that users will stay on that website. Good organization is important here. Especially with larger projects, a crawl depth that is too high can quickly lead to confusion.
