What does a “broken link” mean?

Introduction

Let’s say that you run a large e-commerce website, and you sell many thousands of different products.

And, let’s say that your business is an electrical retailer, and as soon as a product is no longer made by the manufacturer, your business then may delete that page.

Would we say as an SEO company that this is a good idea?

Well, often we work with businesses to see whether a “301 redirect” can be used instead.

So what do we mean by this?

Well, let’s say that your business sells fridge freezers, and you might have stocked a fridge freezer for a very long time, it’s just that the manufacturer has stopped making this fridge freezer now.

Yet, that page might have accrued a lot of quality backlinks, and it may also rank high on Google.

That’s to say the marketing agency may have built a lot of backlinks, which have been built in a “white hat” way.

Therefore, the SEO company might recommend that the page is not deleted, and instead use a “301 redirect” to direct customers to a new page that sells a fridge freezer that’s around a similar price point, made by the same manufacturer?

What would be the benefit of this?

Well, if this is carried out correctly, by a white hat agency, then this could mean that the “link equity” is passed through to the new page.

What does a broken link mean?

Let’s say that you are shopping for a new coffee machine, and you see a result on Google that sells the brand of coffee machine that you want.

You then click on the link, yet you are shown a “404 page error”.

This means that you may shop elsewhere for your coffee machine, and it may also mean that the retailers website incurs a higher bounce rate.

Therefore, the agency should work hard to reduce 404 page errors

Why should your agency try to minimise 404 page errors?

404 page errors can mean that your business incurs a much higher “bounce rate”.

A higher bounce rate means that your shoppers are quickly leaving your company website.

Obviously, the digital marketing agency that you hire here in Cardiff should be working hard to try and keep shoppers on your website for as long as possible, so that it increases your chances of making a sale.

Obviously, if a lot of shoppers are quickly leaving your website, therefore increasing the “bounce rate” then this can be negative on the businesses organic SEO.

This is why our Cardiff SEO tries to minimise 404 page errors, whilst also working with company’s to lower their bounce rate.

Why this can sometimes sever backlinks leading to that page

Let’s say that a web designer is making a design improvement to that page, but when they make the design improvement they accidentally change the URL.

Therefore, the old page is now technically not there, so when somebody clicks on a Google link, they may be presented with a “404 page error”.

So let’s say that you sell used cars, and the web designer changes the page that sells a brand of used car, in doing so they change the URL, by doing so any backlinks, that were once leading to that page, now longer work, as the URL has changed, which could possibly mean that the businesses SEO is negatively impaced.

This can also mean that the backlinks that are pointing to the old URL no longer send “link equity”, because the URL has now changed.

Therefore, any good SEO agency would recommend that the URL either stays the same, or that possibly a “301 redirect” is used.

Why you may wish to keep pages that have a large amount of high-quality backlinks

Let’s say that you have a page which has a large number of backlinks, you might want to keep this page because it may help to improve your businesses SEO.

Why you should avoid broken links

Your SEO company should work hard to reduce the number of broken links, as these 404 pages can stop a page from being crawled and indexed by Googlebot.

They can also increase a business’s bounce rate, it can also mean that your business possibly is losing out on sales, as when somebody is clicking the link, instead of being presented with a product or a service that your company offers, they are instead being shown a 404 page error.

Why this can cause an increase in your businesses “bounce rate”

This can substantially increase your businesses “bounce rate”, which as any good SEO agency will tell you can be negative your businesses SEO.

Why broken links can occur frequently with e-commerce websites

Broken links can frequently occur with e-commerce websites, especially websites that sell thousands of products, because products might go out of stock, and the page might be deleted. This means that a broken link can sometimes occur.

Why your digital marketing agency, may wish to check the SEO report that informs them of 404 page errors.

You may therefore wish to ask your online marketing agency whether they are checking 404 page errors or not.

Is there are a lot of 404  page errors then this should be corrected.

How our agency can help:

We run a white hat SEO company Cardiff, we work with a lot of businesses within the Cardiff area, we can help to improve those businesses organic and local SEO.

Our business can build backlinks in a white hat way, we can also offer content marketing we can also build high-quality WordPress websites.

Our marketing agency is based in Cardiff, yet we work with businesses that are located all over the UK.