SEO Blog

It could be argued that anything that anything that makes your site appear as though it isn’t functioning correctly or hasn’t been properly maintained can prove detrimental to rankings. Whilst the link between coding errors and SEO is often argued, few would question that broken links (both inbound and internal) can have a marked influence on a site’s ability to figure prominently within search engine results.

The reason for this is fairly simple. In the case of internal links, having some pages which are unable to be reached, either from links within the site or listings on Google, can cause significant issues for the search spiders as they crawl a site.
(more…)

Like many of the things covered on this blog, this sounds pretty straightforward. A link is broken, you fix it; not hard really? Well, you would have thought so, but there are still plenty of sites out there sporting linking cul-de-sacs.

The problem with broken links is two -fold. First up is visitor perception. If somebody is on your site and they keep landing on 404 error pages or are re-directed to the homepage time after time they are probably going to think something strange is afoot. Not good for your reputation and certainly won’t do much to improve conversions.

The second issue is with the search engines. If they see a site full of broken links they are unlikely to perceive it as a decent, authoritative source of information and will index you accordingly. You won’t necessarily be punished, but progression could become more challenging as a consequence.
(more…)