Fix SEO Errors With RebelMouse's Broken Links Dashboard

Laura Barros
Mon, 29 Apr 2024 17:11:10 +0000

The Broken Links Dashboard is a powerful tool designed to enhance your website's SEO and usability by identifying and resolving broken links. With an intuitive interface and robust functionality, this tool empowers website owners and RebelMouse’s team members to audit, categorize, and fix broken links efficiently to improve website crawlability and traffic.

How Broken Links Impact Site Performance

Internal and external broken links are detrimental to your website's health. Internal broken links are hyperlinks that lead to non-existent pages within your site, resulting in a 404 error. These links disrupt a search engine's ability to access and index your pages, significantly impacting your website's SEO performance.

External broken links point to dead pages on other websites. Although they are less harmful than internal broken links, external broken links still negatively affect the user experience and your site's credibility.

Fixing broken links is a priority because it improves SEO significantly and increases web traffic. Your primary goal with the Broken Links Dashboard should be to minimize or eliminate broken links on your website, enhancing its SEO performance and the user experience.

You can quickly access this dashboard by appending /r/dashboard/broken_links to your site's URL in your browser's address bar.

How the Broken Links Dashboard Works

After logging into the Broken Links Dashboard, the first thing you should do is start an audit of your website. This process may take some time to finish because it carefully reviews each post on your website to find broken links. You can also periodically start new audits to ensure that your site's health is continuously monitored and maintained.

The audit will identify and display all broken links on your website. We always advise our clients to begin fixing internal links since they negatively impact SEO.

The results prioritize broken links based on their impact, with the links affecting the most post pages appearing first. This prioritization helps to address the most critical issues, improving site performance and SEO.

Once the audit is complete, you have three options to fix the broken links:

Manually Edit Links: To manually edit links, simply click the edit/pencil icon next to any identified broken link and make your changes. Every post containing that link will be automatically updated with the new one, ensuring a smooth and efficient update process.

Bulk or Single Unlink Links: The bulk unlink feature removes several broken links from original posts, addressing multiple issues. We recommend this option for websites that have a large number of broken links. Remember that having no link is better than having a broken link.

Flexible Operations: Use the Download Last Audit button to download a report containing discovered broken links. After downloading the report, analyze it with a tool like Excel or Google Sheets for any specific patterns. Then, set up redirects to the new URLs accordingly. Once the mapping of redirects has been completed, you can use our Bulk Redirect Import tool to systematically apply redirects at scale, streamlining site optimization.

Note: The audit checks all posts for broken links, but it does not detect broken links embedded within your site's layout or template designs.

Enhance Your Site Performance With the Broken Links Dashboard

The Broken Links Dashboard is vital for site health and SEO. It offers insights on internal and external broken links, allowing users to enhance usability and search engine rankings.

Users can efficiently fix links through manual and bulk operations, resulting in improved traffic and user satisfaction.

We recommend addressing all of your site's broken links as soon as possible. But if you’re unable to fix each issue immediately, we suggest the following:

1. Always fix internal broken links first.

2. Focus on the links that affect the most posts.

3. Broken links are worse than not having any. So, if you don't have time to fix them all, we recommend focusing on the ones that are most important and either bulk unlink them (especially external links) or contact our services team for additional help.

To request a demo or add this feature to your account, please get in touch with a RebelMouse specialist or contact your account manager today.