Learn how broken links affect SEO as well as how to diagnose and redirect broken links in this short video.

Broken links can have a negative impact on your website’s search engine rankings and provide a poor user experience for visitors to your website.

Learn to easily find them by scanning your website with www.SiteLiner.com and then to fix them by adding 301 redirects to your WordPress website using the Redirection plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/).

The use of 301 redirects rather than fixing broken links at the page level has two major benefits:

1) The fix is sitewide

2) Anyone attempting to access the broken link from outside of your website (from a link saved in bookmarks, for example) will be redirected to a page of your choice rather than a 404 error page

If you would like to get a comprehensive list of other simple but necessary SEO optimizations, then sign up to receive our Ultimate SEO Checklist.

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Video Transcription

0:05
Hello I’m Jason and I am an analyst here
0:08
at Main Street ROI and here at Main
0:10
Street ROI we specialize in the SEO
0:13
needs of small businesses and also
0:14
digital marketing agencies
0:16
today I’d like to talk to you a little
0:17
bit about
0:19
broken links and how they can affect
0:21
your SEO rankings and your search engine
0:23
rankings
0:25
the first thing to remember is they’re
0:27
bad they provide a bad user experience
0:29
and also they make it hard for Google
0:32
for other search engines to crawl the
0:34
pages which sometimes can come back
0:36
haunt you because basically Google’s
0:39
going to think that your website is not
0:40
done or that has a lot of broken links
0:42
or they’re just not going to rank you
0:44
very highly so here um we’re at the main
0:47
street or the Main Street website here
0:49
and on this page we see we’ve got this
0:52
this missing out link here I click on it
0:58
it will eventually take us to this 404
1:01
page
1:02
this my friends is bad
1:04
we don’t want 404 pages so let’s find
1:07
out how to fix that and we can’t fix
1:09
them before we can find them so the
1:12
first thing I’m going to do is I’m going
1:13
to go to
1:14
um
1:15
sightliner.com
1:21
and I’m going to put in the root URL
1:24
so that’s not it
1:25
I’m going to put in the root URL for
1:29
Main Street ROI’s website
1:33
I’ll paste that in there
1:35
and I’m going to hit start scan
1:37
now I know this website has a lot of
1:40
pages on it so the scan will take a long
1:42
time so rather than make you wait I’ve
1:45
gone ahead and just um
1:47
pre-scanned it
1:49
so here we have our scan you’re going to
1:51
see a summary first
1:55
and what we’re talking about today is
1:57
the broken links
2:00
so we’re going to go here
2:02
that’s going to show us the pages that
2:04
have broken links
2:06
so we’ll click on the first one here
2:08
which is the services page that I just
2:10
showed you a second ago
2:12
and we see here that the broken link is
2:15
this link right here
2:17
okay
2:18
now there’s a number of things we could
2:21
do the first thing you could do is just
2:22
go back into the page and find that link
2:25
and change it
2:26
um
2:27
that’s one option but I wouldn’t do that
2:30
simply because
2:33
um if there’s some other
2:34
what’s the best way to say it let’s say
2:37
you have some marketing material out
2:38
there that has this this link on it
2:41
um that’s not going to solve that
2:43
problem you still could have potential
2:44
clients clicking on a broken link
2:47
um from outside your website so what
2:49
we’re going to do is rather than
2:52
um I mean we’re going to go and fix on
2:53
the page too but we’re also going to go
2:55
ahead and set up a 301 redirect so no
2:58
matter where um where that traffic is
3:00
coming from to this broken link here to
3:02
this slash old page
3:05
um
3:06
we’re gonna set the redirect up so that
3:07
it will then redirect you a page that we
3:09
that we wanted to redirect you and it
3:11
will no longer show as a broken Link at
3:13
that point so the first thing I’m going
3:15
to do is this is a WordPress website
3:18
um
3:19
so what I’m going to do is I’m going to
3:20
go out here to I’m going to Google
3:23
redirection plugin
3:26
for WordPress and I’m going to get this
3:28
plugin
3:29
which is called redirection by John
3:31
Godley and you’ll go ahead and install
3:33
that on your site I’m not going to show
3:35
you how to do that today because it’s
3:36
outside the scope of this training video
3:39
um but I’m sure you know how to do that
3:40
if not just Google that you’ll find it
3:43
um then I’m going to go into the
3:44
dashboard of
3:46
of Main Street ROI of my website
3:50
and I’m going to go over here to
3:53
OLS
3:55
and then redirection
4:01
and we’re going to get
4:02
this page
4:04
so we scroll all the way to the bottom
4:08
and here’s where we’re going to add our
4:09
new redirection
4:11
so we’re going to take the source URL
4:13
that is our broken link so we’ll go back
4:16
here to our scan
4:18
grab this link
4:22
I’m going to copy it
4:25
and then we’re going to come back here
4:26
to redirection and we’re going to put it
4:27
in here now notice it says that the
4:29
relative URL
4:31
so we’re not going to use the whole URL
4:34
we’re going to take out
4:36
everything
4:38
um from the actual page title on down
4:42
here
4:43
so it’s old page
4:44
okay now where do we want to redirect to
4:48
well our page here
4:55
is about advertising with Google ads
4:59
so I’m going to go and I’m going to
5:01
redirect us to
5:04
um
5:06
do you want to go into services for
5:09
Main Street ROI and then advertising
5:13
since we’re talking about advertising
5:15
and then I’m going to go up here and I’m
5:17
going to grab
5:19
this URL
5:21
of the page
5:23
back over here to our redirection
5:26
if I could find it
5:28
and then that’s our Target URL again
5:31
this is a
5:34
it’s a relative URL so we’re taking out
5:37
the mainstreetroi.com
5:41
um
5:42
that’s really all you have to do
5:45
um
5:47
redirection is saved
5:51
go up here and check it
5:55
there it is so it’s going to take any
5:57
traffic that goes to slash old page and
5:59
it’s going to redirect it to our
6:02
advertising page here
6:04
and that way when we run another scan
6:06
it’s not going to show
6:08
um any broken any broken links for that
6:12
so that’s really all that there is to it
6:15
um
6:16
hopefully that helps um if you have any
6:18
questions please mention them in the
6:20
comments
6:21
um I’d be happy to answer them
6:22
and remember here at Main Street at ROI
6:24
we specialize in helping small business
6:26
clients with their SEO needs as well as
6:29
digital marketing agencies what their
6:31
client needs uh thanks for watching and
6:33
I hope it was helpful