As I’ve written many times on this blog, having URLs on your website that return errors is a significant negative both in terms of SEO and user experience. And yet, it’s surprisingly common to see them left unattended. Even on the websites of major companies, it’s not unusual to encounter an error after clicking a button that says something like “Learn more.”
When Google’s search engine crawls your site, it follows the links on each page to discover and index additional content. If any of those links lead to an error, the crawl process stops there. This undoubtedly harms your SEO.
The same goes for real users browsing your site, and in fact, this is an even bigger problem than SEO.
Imagine a user who arrives at your website through some channel and starts engaging with your content, only to click on a link that takes them to an error page. Not only does this leave a bad impression, but in many cases, as soon as they see an error screen like the one pictured above, they immediately close the page. And they don’t come back.
Even if you’ve spent money on advertising or invested in SEO strategies, all of that effort goes to waste because of a single broken link.
To avoid this, it’s best to either use automated tools to regularly check for broken links or refrain from including external links in the first place whenever possible.
