Do Broken Links Alter Website Revenue?

Broken links reflect negatively on your website and your company.  A website full of broken links will reflect poorly on your professionalism to potential customers which then gives them reason to buy from someone else and reduces your website revenue.

If you have broken links it will reduce your hard-earned rank among popular search engines and your potential for increased website revenue.  While you may not view a broken link here or there as a big deal, people who save links or bookmark them for future reference do.  By leaving broken links on your website you are creating a bad user experience for a large customer base.  Search engines will take note of this.  They want to provide customers with the best possible information and a great user experience. If you have broken links on your website, it will severely damage your reputation with the search engines. This makes your company website less desirable which decreases your rank and your potential for any website revenue.

Therefore, it is imperative that you fix any broken links regularly to improve website revenue.  Link checking can be an incredible chore, unless you only have a handful of pages on your website with under a dozen links.  The benefits of checking and fixing broken links may not offer instant gratification, but over the long haul it is well worth the investment.

Benefits to Fixing Broken Links

Broken links make your website look bad.  A visitor will think that your website is untended and that it may be quite old or otherwise neglected.  This will reflect poorly on your services too.  When a reader clicks a link on your website and it results in a 404 error page, it makes the reader think that your company does not care about the content on the website or the customers.  Removing these broken links will ensure your readers are happy and more willing to buy.

Having valid links on your website helps the Google spiders navigate your website.  This is an integral part of SEO.  You need to make sure that the web crawlers associated with these search engines can easily navigate your website so that they can index it.  If you have broken links, then the web crawling spiders will not be able to follow them.  When you update your pages and correct broken links you also improve SEO and increase website revenue.  Search engines know when you make changes to your web pages and will come back to re-crawl and see if anything on the listing needs to be changed.  When you regularly fix any broken links your website looks like it being regularly maintained which increase your rank.

Overall it is in the best interest of your company to regularly scan your website to find and fix broken links.  Doing this regularly will increase your rank and improve your potential for website revenue.  If your website is small with only a few pages and links you can manually check the links regularly, but if the website is large you can turn to professional sources for automatic scans.