Broken links on your photography site? Learn how to fix it

broken links on your site, besides being a nuisance for the people who visit your website, also worsen your visibility on the Internet, so it is important that you learn how to locate them and, more importantly, how to fix them so that this error stops happening.

Adding both external and internal links to your website is a very simple way to improve the positioning of your digital business but sometimes these links produce some kind of error that makes the effect the opposite, so today we want to explain how to find the broken links on your site and repair them, you will see how simple it is.

Learn how to find and fix broken links on your photography site.

What are broken links on your site?

As we were saying, it is important to create a link on your website so that Google values you much better when it comes to positioning your website. This linking consists of adding a series of external and internal links in the different parts of your website (articles, text type pages, etc.). This greatly benefits SEO positioning because it lowers the bounce rate and improves the user experience.

But sometimes part of this linking can give an error forming broken links on your site, either because you have copied the URL wrong or because the page you want to link has ceased to exist, for example, because you have deleted an article. When this happens, the user who clicks on the link will get an error message, the famous 404 error, indicating that this content is not available at that moment. This is a page to which Google has redirected the user, as it no longer exists and is not a valid page, so it ends up damaging the user experience.

You will really have 3 types of links to control, some you will find easier to control and some not so easy to control.

• Internal linking. These are links that you add from other parts of your website to content on your website.
• External link. These are links from external pages that you share in the content of your website.
• Inbound links. These are links from your own website that other people share in their content.

Find out how broken links affect your web positioning

A bad user experience has a negative impact on the reputation of your website because it makes it lose credibility, but in the long term, it also has some negative consequences:

• Increase the bounce rate of your photography website. The average duration of visits to your website will decrease. Because if a user finds a broken link during the visit to your photography website, he will not stay much longer on it. This negatively affects SEO because the bounce rate is something that Google takes into account for the positioning of your website in search engines.

• It impacts the acquisition rate. If a user can’t find a page on your photography website because they find a broken link, they are likely to have a very bad user experience and are unlikely to return to your website.

• It hinders the conversion rate of your photography website. Conversion rate refers to the number of users that come to your website and end up becoming customers. Broken links are an obstacle to this customer conversion process, they make you lose business and often make your SEO efforts come to nothing.

As you can see, broken links on your website have very negative consequences for your website and it is important to check them from time to time so that you don’t miss any.

The good news is that they are easy to find and, even better, to repair. That’s why it’s something you should keep an eye on from time to time so that it doesn’t detract from the effectiveness of your photography website’s SEO strategy.

Find and fix broken links on your photography site

When you have had a website for a long time and you are very active on your blog, it can sometimes happen that you link several articles, name the website of a collaborating company or simply encourage your visitors to consult the information of a photographic service that you no longer offer. What can happen in these cases is that over time, you have modified certain aspects of your work that no longer represent you and you delete pages and/or articles. In these cases is when the 404 error can occur due to not finding internal links.

The same happens when you share information external to your website and for whatever reason it ceases to exist. All those links will end up damaging your photography website and it is essential that you know how to locate broken links on your site. Or when other users are sharing certain content that you once published on your website and now it is no longer published.

Learn how to find broken links on your photography website

To find broken links on your site there are currently several free and paid tools that you can use. From Arcadina we are going to show you our favourite online tools to find broken links on your photographer’s website.

We must warn you that the easiest links to find are the internal and external ones because you will have them published on your own website, the incoming ones are more complicated to locate.

Free Backlink Checker by LRT

This Free Backlink Checker tool by LRT is nothing more and nothing less than a Chrome extension that identifies the outgoing links of a website and classifies them in red or green, depending on whether they are broken or working properly. And as you can see, it is very easy to use.

SEOInfo

SEOInfo is another Google extension that looks for SEO errors, including broken links. It is very easy to use and very intuitive, so finding 404 errors will be very easy and visual.

Search Console

Google Search Console is a Google tool that monitors the presence of a website in Google. In order to use it, you have to verify your photography website. It also includes the Crawl Errors report which allows you to see pages with 404 errors.

Online Broken Link Checker

Online Broken Link Checker is an online tool that you can use in its free or paid version to detect broken links on your website. The free version has a small limitation and that is that you can only make queries from your homepage, but its great advantage is that it is very quick and easy to use and will give you the total number of broken links on the entire website.

W3C Link Checker

W3C Link Checker is a very complete tool that will not only give you information about the broken links on your website but will also inform you about other very interesting data and will offer you the information in table format.

Dead Link Checker

Dead Link Checker is a very comprehensive website that will allow you to find broken links and other error codes.

Doctor Link Check

Doctor Link Check is another totally free application where you will be able to find all the broken links with a 404 message on your website. This tool will also offer you a series of more technical information.

Repair broken links with the help of 301 redirection

In the case of an internal link or inbound link, you can redirect from the old address to the new one because it is your own content. For these 2 cases, you should try to make sure that all redirects are 301 (indicating a permanent change of location from one web page to another), because these are the ones that benefit the SEO of the website.

Another advantage of using a 301 redirect is that if you do it, you will be able to keep the positioning that the original page already had. Therefore, rather than deleting a page or article and creating a new one from scratch, it is more advisable to redirect it if the content is related.

It gets more complicated in the case of an external link, because you would have to find the link to the new page or to another page that replaces the old one or, failing that, completely remove the reference to another page external to your website.

Say goodbye to broken links on your photography site and improve your web positioning

At Arcadina we believe that broken links on your photography site are a part of SEO positioning that is very easy to identify and control, so you should not let them affect the organic positioning of your photography website. Thanks to this article and all the free tools we have shared with you today, you will be able to eliminate them quickly.

Here we are going to share with you an article with several ideas to improve the SEO of your photography website.

>> 5 keys to improve the positioning of a photography website

Before finishing we would like to share with you the testimony of the photographer Gema Romero from Ilusiones Art Photo.

>> Gema Romero: ‘I love what Arcadina looks like’

And to finish this article we would like to ask you a question: Did you already know how to locate and fix broken links on your site? We’ll read you in the comments.

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