How To Find & Fix Broken External Links (The Right Way)

Posted by Everett Schaefer on February 5th, 2021

What if I will tell you about a scenario that all your broken links are being redirected properly, but still do not pass any value? This can happen much more often than you would expect, in case of overlooked deployment of the robots.txt file. So how can authority backlinks check it? Either via Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester (which will make this job a little tedious), or via SEOBOOK robots.txt analyzer. After adding your robots.txt you can export the list of backlinks and check if some of the rules block any of these urls. If some lines are blocking the redirects, make sure you remove it (but carefully). Similar to section no. 5 (regarding robots.txt), this one can be easily missed, as most of the link analysis tools do not state the status of the robots.txt nor the Meta Robots tag. So even if these pages return a 200 status code, it still does not guarantee Google will index and crawl them. Let’s say you have dozens of out-of-stock product pages that you have decided to block with noindex a while ago. How can you make sure you’re not missing any of those? You are starting to work with a new client and their link graph is nothing to brag about. You do not need any fancy SEO tools to check it. Just ASK your client if there are any old domains or properties, it can be either their main website or other old domains that are in their disposal. You will be surprised to find how many times clients don’t understand the importance behind their old domains and do not even bother to mention it. And NO, you will not see it in the Ahrefs or any other given tool if nobody had bothered to redirect them. Lately, I myself even accidentally found an old domain for one of my clients. In their mind, it was an old website, and they were not slightly aware of its potential (although that’s always the first question I ask). It’s not only the NUMBER of referring domains, but also their QUALITY. Take into account that in some instances, if a given page returns a 404 header (or 410 for that matter), maybe it was intentionally. Perhaps the former SEO company was smart enough to remove some old pages that had toxic spammy links that had been built manually in the past. So the idea is to really analyze those links BEFORE deciding whether to redirect them or not. If you have valuable broken links to your website - make sure you properly fix them. Make sure you are not missing out on anything. Analyze the links. Fix them properly. It’s not enough to just go over your backlinks. What do you think? After checking your link graph, did you find any nice surprises? � Hit me in the comments section!