Broken pages

What are broken pages, why are they bad and how to fix them.

Florian avatar
Written by Florian
Updated over a week ago

What is the issue?

Broken pages impact both usability of your website as users have a bad experience on your site if they cannot access the page they desire. Additionally, broken pages impact SEO as they can result in a weakened crawlability of your website.

How to fix

Broken pages occur when a web page cannot be found, for example if the link to the page is incorrect, or you have deleted pages that are still being linked to. You can fix this issue by updating links to the broken page or by bringing the target page back to life.

  1. The columns "incoming links" and "incoming references" show how many links there are to the broken page.

  2. Clicking on the number reveals the full list of internal links pointing to the broken page.

  3. Using the "anchor text" column helps us find where the link is on the page.

  4. You can also visit the referring URL in your browser, right click, and view the page source, then use the find function to see where the link is.

  5. Once found, you can update or remove the link.

Tip: if the broken page is being linked to many times, it may be found within a menu or navigation element. Try to fix these broken links first as it will clear up issues across a large portion of your website.

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