If you want that your website should be a popular then, this popularity can only be achieved if Google has ranked your site fairly fine. For this, your SEO strategies must be good and free from all kinds of damages.
Broken links act as an unfruitful experience for your beloved customers. This is due to the reason that whenever a customer visits a website, he/she wants to immediately land on to the website which is useful for them. But, the interference of these unwanted links forbids that task. This is the reason as to why it is recommended not to have broken pages on your website.
When your website links to a different website, it is called outbound links. These outbound links affect SEO in the following ways:
Increase of load on your page
Under outbound links, a chain of redirects goes from one URL to another. At every step in this process, about 10-20% of authority is lost. This also increases all overload of the webpage. All this, in turn, decreases the quality of your website, and you lose your customers, unfortunately. Even a single step redirect can do this damage.
Increases the time of loading
There is no denying the fact that even a single redirect of URL can increase the loading time of the actual website one wants to reach. This wastes the time of all the visitors of a particular website. And certainly, that website may lose traffic in future.
Harm created via your internal links
Another way in which an outbound link can affect your SEO is through your internal links. Due to this defect, your internal links start to point out to those unnecessary URLs that are redirected to another place altogether. This way the customers lands up to wrong and unwanted sites.
Following ways may help you to avoid outbound links:
- First and the foremost prevention you should carry from your side is keep on auditing your webpage and website on a regular basis. This gives you an assurance that your traffic is not directed to broken pages.
- If your site is comparatively large then it is not possible to check each page manually. Under such scenario, it is recommended to pay and have back-link checkers. These checkers help to find out the broken links and repair them.
- Try to update your page or content and do not remove it once you discover that your webpage is infected with outbound linking. This prevents unwanted 404 pages (it is that type of error which may result due to relocation or deletion of content on the page).
- Also, if the old content of your website still exists but you have changed the location due to outbound linking, then make sure to redirect the visitors to the new page. For this, 301 redirects can be used.
Above everything, if you want to save your website from such harmful attacks, and want a proper ranking on every search engine, then keep a regular check of your website. This regularity only helps you to catch and repair the problems at their roots only.