Gary Illyes from Google recently answered a question about whether you should spend time fixing backlinks that point to your website at the wrong URL, also known as broken backlinks. His answer is interesting because it suggests a completely unconventional way of looking at this issue.
Google: Should you fix broken backlinks?
On a recent Google SEO Office Hours podcast, the following question was asked about fixing broken backlinks:
“Do I need to fix all the broken backlinks to my site to improve my overall SEO?”
Google's Gary Ilyes responded:
“You need to fix broken backlinks that you think would be useful to your users. It's impossible to fix all the links, especially once your site grows to the size of a mammoth or a brontosaurus.”
Unconventional advice
Evaluating broken backlinks to find the ones that are most useful to “users” is an unconventional way of deciding whether to fix them. Traditional SEO practice would fix broken backlinks to ensure your site receives the most available link equity. So while his advice goes against standard SEO practice, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, as there may be something useful in there.
Be open-minded and open to different ways of considering a solution. What I like about his approach is that it's a shortcut to determine if a backlink is useful or not. For example, if the link points to a discontinued or unsupported product, a 404 response is the best way to show it to search crawlers and users. So there is some validity to his thinking.
Why you need to fix broken backlinks
Fixing these types of backlinks isn't too difficult – it's one of the easier SEO tasks and will give you quick results.
The benefit is hard to measure, but it's worth doing for your site visitors who may end up on the wrong URL to the webpage they're looking for.
Checking backlinks after a link building campaign
After a backlink campaign, it's important to check your backlinks even months after you asked for them. Sometimes site owners add links after a few weeks or months, but they might have added the wrong URL. This is common. I know from experience.
Important vs. Non-Important Broken Backlinks
The types of broken backlinks that are usually (but not always) problematic are those that show up as 404 errors in your server logs or Google Search Console.
There are two types of broken backlinks that matter.
- Backlinks that are broken because the page they link to no longer exists or the URL has changed.
- The backlink URL is misspelled.
Then there are backlinks that are less important, and here's why:
- Because broken backlinks are from low-quality websites that don’t send traffic
- Since the link is to an old webpage and is not important, a 404 response should be returned.
- This is just a random link created by an AI chatbot, spambot, or a spam web page.
How to Identify Broken Backlinks
The best way to identify the type of broken backlink is probably to look at the 404 errors generated from visits to pages that no longer exist or misspelled URLs. If the link is important, then the broken backlink will generate web traffic to your 404 page.
You may not know where the link came from, but you may be able to find it by searching for the broken URL.
Server logs can show the IP address and user agent of the site visitor who created the broken link, allowing site owners to determine whether it was a spam or hacker bot, a search engine bot, or a real user. For site owners who don't have access to server logs, the Redirection WordPress plugin and the Wordfence plugin can help.
Site owners may think that using a SaaS backlink tool to find broken links might be useful, but using a tool might not be a good solution because many sites, especially those that have been around for a long time, have many backlinks and it would take a lot of work to find the links that are not sending traffic. If a broken link is sending traffic, you will know because it will show up as a 404 error response.
Fixing broken backlinks
You can fix links that no longer exist by recreating the resources or by redirecting requests for the missing web page to a substantially similar web page.
Fixing a link to a misspelled URL can be as simple as redirecting the misspelled URL to the correct URL.
Another way to fix this is to contact the site that's linking to the incorrect URL, but before you do that there are three things to consider:
1. A website owner may not want you to link to their site and may remove the link entirely.
2. Site owners may decide to add a no-follow link attribute to the corrected URLs.
3. Other sites may copy your webpage or link and link to the wrong URL.
Simply adding a redirect from the misspelled URL to the correct one will solve the issue without the risk of your backlink being removed or nofollowed.
Fixing broken backlinks
Identifying broken backlinks is something that can trip up many site owners when investigating 404 errors. Some call this link recycling, but the “link recycling” discussion is essentially about fixing broken backlinks, it's just another name for it.
Either way, fixing these types of inbound links is one of the few quick SEO wins that actually benefit site owners and can be part of a site audit, especially if it is limited to finding opportunities in 404 error responses, since these links are either being crawled or are being used by potential site visitors.
To learn how to fix broken backlinks, listen to the podcast at about 5 minutes and 32 seconds.
Featured image: Shutterstock/Roman Samborskyi