Broken link repair has long been considered an SEO best practice. However, you're not alone if you've ever restored a faulty link and nothing occurred. SEO professionals debate whether these solutions are still relevant, and walk you through the procedures to improve your odds of seeing results.
Is it still important to update old broken links for SEO? Fixing broken links is an SEO best practice, therefore it's a wonderful question. It's something you hear about all the time. But if you've been doing SEO for a while, you've probably come into scenarios where you've corrected a broken link or discovered a website with hundreds, if not thousands, of broken links, updated it, redirected it to a new destination, and nothing happened.
Is this something that happens frequently? Is this a common occurrence? Has Google altered its approach to broken links? What's going on here, what are the best practices, and how can we improve our odds of getting a benefit from restoring broken links? That's what we'll be discussing here. SEO experts at iGlobe Solutions, the best digital marketing company in Jaipur stay updated with all the tactics used to rank your website high on a search engine.
Why do we need to update broken links?
So, why do we fix broken links in the first place? This is the fundamental information, the introduction.
Signals are sent between links. For things like PageRank and anchor text, Google employs links. As a result, when they uncover links, they can enhance your ranks. When a website 404s, those links break, and they go to a page that doesn't operate, those link signals are lost, which might affect your SEO. These are usually induced by one of two factors.
To begin with, the link is simply awful. It leads to a page on your website that doesn't exist or something similar. It has an odd parameter in it. Someone spelled it incorrectly. However, pages on your own site frequently break. You delete a page without redirecting it to another. Because this is a typical circumstance, a combination of these elements can result in tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of links on any particular site.
As a result, we update broken links in order to reclaim link juice and receive the ranking boost that Google seeks. So it's meant to work, and it usually does, and a lot of the time it's fantastic. There are situations, though, when it does not function.
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Why it may or may not work
So, what may be going on here when it doesn't work? So, here are four reasons why restoring broken links might not be enough in some cases.
The hyperlinks were not taken into account
To begin with, the links may not have been valid, to begin with. The fact is that there are a lot of links that Google ignores. These might be spam links, manipulative links, or non-editorial links they come across. Just because a program displays a link as broken or linking to a non-existent page doesn't mean it is worthless. That might be one of the reasons why repairing the damaged link isn't working.
The links have a poor worth
Second, though Google may have counted those links, they were deemed to be of poor value or old. Consider a link on a new page that is a broken link from a ten-year-old page. It doesn't get a lot of traffic or none at all. It's all the way down at the bottom. This page receives no traffic. It isn't even ranked by Google.
Do you think Google will place high importance on restoring that broken link? Most likely not. When you're correcting broken links, you may come across low-value, non-fresh links, or pages that haven't been updated. They may not transmit much value, and repairing them may not be beneficial.
You were routed to a non-relevant URL
Third, and this is a very typical explanation, you corrected the link, but you redirected it to an irrelevant or less relevant URL.
Sites that cease a whole section and redirect everything to the homepage are a good example of this. They delete a subdomain. They take you to a category page or anything along those lines. Google will frequently report these as soft 404s, which means they see your redirect but don't believe the page you're redirecting to is as important as the original page or the page that was broken or meant to be there in the first place.
Google might not be able to rely on "alive" links
The fourth reason it could not work is that there's a phenomenon, a hypothesis, that Google doesn't always rely on active links, that these link signals don't have to be there all of the time for Google to appreciate them.
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As a result, we don't always know how Google handles older links. However, it is not always essential for links to be live in order for them to convey value, therefore repairing them has little impact. Again, we don't have much insight into how Google operates in this area, but it's likely that the link signals just passed on their significance anyway.
