One of the problems that penalizes good SEO optimization of a site is the presence of broken links.

Having broken links within a website could impair users’ navigation.

Continue reading Dear Web’s article to find out how to spot them and remedy them so that they do not cause very serious damage to your site’s traffic.

What are broken links?
Broken links are addresses whose destination is incorrect or inactive. If in the case you have created a link that leads from the homepage to another section of your site but you made a typo in the URL, the link will lead to an error page and will, therefore, be a broken link.

Returning error pages is an error that results in a strong penalty from search engines. In fact, following links that lead to nonexistent or error pages causes a bad user experience and results in possible site abandonment.

Links, however, can break frequently as web pages change and are closed all the time.

Let’s find out what solutions you can apply to solve this problem.

The Google Search Console
Google provides free tools for all web platforms. These tools help you identify crawl errors, that is, errors generated by Google’s inability to read the content of your page. These errors include broken links.

To solve this problem, add your site to Google Search Console and log in with your Google account. At this point you will need to verify that you are the owner of the site to be analyzed, and you can choose to verify it by domain or URL prefix.

Now you can proceed with site verification: you can proceed with full site verification (with or without www, http or https) using the Domain system, or verify the individual version of the site by adding an HTML tag, uploading an html file, providing the provider name, via a code for Google Analytics and via Google Tag Manager.

After verifying your site you can use all the features of Google Search Console, such as the one in the Coverage section that allows you to detect crawl errors.

From here you can check which links are broken on your site, which links are nonexistent, and which generate a 404 error.