Broken Link

A link refers to a reference from a website to another page or document. In the case of a broken link, this reference is defective, i.e. the link target is not accessible. It does not matter whether the link target is on your own website (internal link) or on another website (external link).

Broken links and SEO

Faulty links have an impact on the search engine optimisation of websites. When a website is crawled by a search engine bot, it follows the links on a page. If the crawler encounters a broken link, it reports an error. Search engines such as Google and others attach great importance to displaying error-free results to their users. If the search engine bot encounters errors within the website, it is rated lower, which in turn has a negative effect on the ranking.

Broken links and the HTTPS status code

Every file that is stored on a server returns a so-called HTTPS status code to the client when it is called up. These can be documents, images or HTML pages of a website. If the file can be retrieved, the server returns the status code 200. If it is a broken link, the server returns the status code 404, 410 or 5xx.

The meaning of the respective status codes

A status code that begins with a 5 indicates that the server is not accessible. Codes with a 4 indicate that the actual document is accessible. In all cases, this is a broken link, i.e. the requested file is not available on the server at this URL. If the server reports the status code 404, this means that the requested file is currently not available. The status code 410, on the other hand, means that the document is permanently unavailable.

If a search engine bot encounters a broken link with the status code 404 during its crawl, it will check again during the next crawl whether the file is available. If the content is not reached several times, the URL is deindexed, i.e. removed from the search engine index. With a status code 410, deindexing is faster, as the search engine knows from the status code that the document is no longer permanently available.

So if you want to remove a page or document from the index more quickly, you can use the status code 410. In general, however, you should make sure to delete all incoming links on your website to this URL when removing content so that search engine bots do not encounter a broken link during their crawl. As it is not always known where a document or page is linked from, you can use tools such as Screaming Frog to detect broken links on your website. This provides you with a report that shows which pages contain a broken link, regardless of whether it is an internal or external link.

Ruth Pfahler is a search engine optimization specialist with over 15 years of professional experience. As an SEO freelancer, she optimizes websites for companies in a wide range of industries. Under the motto “Make your business grow”, she supports companies in increasing their visibility at the point of interest and thus their turnover. She shares her knowledge in regular posts on social media (LinkedIn), specialist lectures and publications in trade journals and internet portals.

Ruth Pfahler, SEO Freelancer