How To Find And Remove Broken Links On Your ECommerce Website
Having broken links on your ecommerce website is not helpful when trying to improve your website’s rankings within the search engine results. Not only do broken links ruin your visitors’ experience, search engines will penalize your website when determining where to rank it within the results as they do not feel you are providing their users with the best experience possible. Because of these negative effects, you will want to locate and remove any broken links from your ecommerce website as quickly as possible. Bellow are my tips about this strategy, based on my own experience while I was running SEO campaign for Paramold ecommerce website.
Broken Link Tools
If you are using WordPress as your content management system, you can use a plugin to locate broken links on your site. These plugins will scan your ecommerce website and will find any broken links that it may contain and provide you with an actionable report when it is finished. Looking over these results will allow you to quickly spot which URLs are broken and require your immediate attention.
If you are not using WordPress, you will be able to take advantage of other software such as Link Tiger to help you monitor your website for broken links. If your ecommerce website has hundreds of product pages, it will be nearly impossible to manually check your website for broken links. Using a software such as Link Tiger will allow you to automate the process of scanning your website for broken links, enabling you to focus on other aspects of your online business.
Broken Links On Your ECommerce
Removing Broken Links
Once you discover your ecommerce website has broken links, you will need to do something about them to help improve the user experience associated with your website. If a broken link was pointing to a page with content that is similar to another page of your website, you can simply redirect the broken link so that it points to the current existing content as anyone who would click on the now broken link would enjoy reading the similar content that you are directing them to. However, if the page that is missing from your website had unique content that cannot be found anywhere else on your website, you will simply want to remove the link all together.
Getting rid of the broken link will remove any chance of you making a mistake during your link cleaning project. If the URL that is now broken was a popular page of your website, you will want to replicate the content that was once visible to your visitors using another URL. This will ensure that your most popular products and content remain on your ecommerce website without any chances of broken links sneaking past your detection.
When running an ecommerce website, the user experience of your website should be one of your top priorities. One way your website’s user experience can be negatively affected is by having several broken links on your website. Nothing is more frustrating for a consumer than trying to view a product page and instead being taken to a non-existing web page that contains a 404 error message. Scanning your ecommerce website with a plugin or other broken link checker will help you quickly discover any and all broken links on your website so that you can then take the appropriate action to remove that link from your ecommerce website.
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Ben Sawyer is an SEO strategist for more than 5 years. He helped many of his clients to improve their online rankings. Here Ben shared his tips about how to find and remove broken links, based on his own experience, while he was running a campaign for Paramold.com ecommerce website.
