A broken link or dead link is a link in a web that is no longer functioning due to one or more reasons below:

Reasons Why Broken Link Occurs

Web owners need to know the factors that cause a link to be inaccessible to internet users. That way, they can minimize the presence of broken links on their website. Some of the causes of broken links are as follows:

• The wrong URL was added by the owners of the website.
• Destination web has deleted destination web page (that makes problem known as 404 error occurs).
• The destination website or web page is moved permanently or no longer active.
• The user has software or is behind a firewall that blocks access to the destination website.
• The site owner provides a backlink to the site behind the firewall that does not allow any access from outside.

A broken link can be a problem for website visitors, so they cannot access the information that they want. These visitors eventually decide to use another website to find the information that they need. The site that has not been updated or checked for a quite long time can be a broken link or dead link.

Other Terms

• dead link
• rotten link

How to Deal with Broken Link

An inaccessible link can result in a bad experience for website users. Therefore, web owners need to ensure that every link they have can work properly. Some ways to fix broken links that you can try are:

• Check the error on Google Crawl
• Avoid linking to content that is far from the website, except it is needed.
• If the link is an external link, open the website that has authority to that link and ask for improvement.
• The use of redirect transition.
• Remake and change the content in the broken URL.
• Do redirect (301) from the broken page to another relevant page on your website.

Fixing the issues of broken links is something that needs to be considered in SEO activities. For this reason, quick actions are needed so that problems can be resolved without problems.

You can use the redirect checker tool from cmlabs to see which URLs are redirected. The way to do is is to copy the URL of the site you want to check. Then, select User Agent, click Check URL, and wait for the report to be displayed.