Broken Backlinks Impact SEO
If not properly overseen by an SEO professional, a website migration or relaunch project can create countless broken backlinks from other websites. This is a golden opportunity for recovering link equity.
Some of the top pages on your site may have become 404 pages after a migration, so the backlinks pointing back to these 404 pages are effectively broken.
Two types of tools are great for finding broken backlinks — Google Search Console, and a backlink checker such as Moz.
In Search Console, you’ll want to review your top 404 errors and it will prioritize the top errors by broken backlinks.
What to do:
- After identifying your top pages with backlinks that are dead, 301 redirect these to the best pages
- Also look for broken links because the linking site typed in your URL wrong or messed up the link code on their end, this is another rich source of link opportunities
What to do next:
- Use other tools such as Mention or Google Alerts to keep an eye on unlinked mentions that you can reach out to for an extra link
- Set up a recurring site crawl or manual check to look out for new broken links