Broken outbound links are inevitable, given enough time. You may wonder if having broken outbound links on your website hurts your SEO, and whether you should fix them. Let's explore these questions.
Outbound links, also known as external links, are links from your website to another website. Links from your website to other pages within your website are called internal links.
An outbound link could be broken because it was added incorrectly, such as with a typo.
More commonly, outbound links break because the websites you link to change. They could go offline, making all their pages inaccessible. Or they could reorganize their content and change their URLs, and not add redirects so that the old links continue to work.
Website owners are understandably concerned about ways their search engine optimization (SEO) can be damaged. You may be wondering if having broken outbound links on your website hurt your SEO.
Search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.) can evaluate the outbound links of your site to draw conclusions about your site. If you link to authoritative sites, that can be a positive signal for your site. If you link to low-quality or irrelevant sites, that can be a negative signal for your site.
Broken outbound links prevent users from getting where they want to go, which can cause them to spend less time on your site and increase your bounce rate (percentage of users who land on a page and leave, without visiting other pages on your site). These metrics can negatively affect your SEO.
If you have many broken outbound links, search engines could conclude that your site is outdated or unmaintained, which can be a negative signal for your site.
In case you're getting worried, you should know that broken links aren't likely to hurt your SEO unless you have a lot of them. Search engines understand that broken outbound links are a reality of the Web, and that most websites aren't actively finding and fixing broken outbound links.
Broken internal links are worse than broken outbound links, because they prevent users from getting where they want to within your site. You should prioritize fixing broken internal links over fixing outbound ones.
If you're serious about SEO and looking for every opportunity to increase your rankings, then it could be worthwhile to fix your broken outbound links, starting with those on your most popular pages.
If your site runs WordPress, you can use the free Broken Link Checker plugin to scan for broken outbound (and internal) links. If you run a scan, fix broken links, then want to scan again, you can go to Settings > Link Checker > Advanced tab, scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Re-check all pages.
Whether your site runs WordPress or not, you can use Ahrefs' free Broken Link Checker and BrokenLinkCheck.com (it looks outdated, but works well).
Once you've found broken links, you can edit the pages or posts that contain them, then correct the link.
If the original site is still online, link to the correct URL. If you can't find it from the website, you can do a web search for the page title, which may help you locate it.
If the original site is offline, you can link to an alternative, similar page on a different website. If you can't find one, you can not use an outbound link at all.
If you'd rather eat broken glass than find and fix broken links or deal with other SEO tasks, contact us so we can evaluate which SEO efforts will be the most worthwhile, and manage your SEO for you.