Broken or incorrect hyperlinks not only affect users, they interfere with Googlebot’s ability to crawl your site.
Luckily, there are a few approaches you can follow here to resolve the problem.
Broken or incorrect hyperlinks can lead to issues for users and search engine spiders. To start, a broken hyperlink will disrupt a user’s search journey. If a user is served a 404 page, they may very well return to the SERP to continue their search at another domain — it could even be your competitor’s site.
Broken links also disrupt Googlebot’s crawl of your website, and will end up in a wasted crawl budget.
The wrong hyperlink isn’t much better — you can take users on the wrong online journey, and ruin the internal linking between your topic clusters.
As you know, this issue has multiple solutions. The one you choose will depend on your situation and what you want your desired outcome to be.
One solution involves keeping the hyperlink, while the others involve removing it entirely.
This solution involves updating the link. More specifically, you’re making an update to the href attribute of the hyperlink.
With this solution, the text stays the same, the only thing that changes is the new hyperlink.
For example, we may want to change the href from this:
https://exple.com/
… to this:
https://example.com/
Another way to solve this issue is to remove both the link and text. As opposed to updating the hyperlink, this approach calls for deleting the link completely.
A third option is to remove the link but keep the text. The exact option you choose will depend on your page and what content is necessary or helpful for that page.
All of these solutions require you to make direct edits to your site’s links — either updates or deletions. You may be able to do this through your CMS. If not, you can call in the dev team to assist.
Recommended Reading: How to Find and Fix Broken Internal Links at Scale
You can fix broken hyperlinks across your site at scale with SEO execution platform Clarity Automate. This way, a few clicks is all it takes is to implement these fixes.
This optimization requires that we update links, so that’s what we select in ClarityAutomate.
As opposed to adding or deleting, this solution calls for an update.
This step focuses on the hyperlink that is broken or incorrect.
We want to update the link to a working link, so the href attribute is what needs to be updated.
All that’s left to do is enter a valid, working hyperlink and push the changes live!
This solution also starts by selecting “Links” in ClarityAutomate.
As opposed to the first solution, this scenario calls for deleting the link and the text.
Then, enter the XPath location of the link and text to be removed.
This final approach is a two-step process. First, we need to add the text. Then, we can delete the original text and the link.
To add new text, we select “Content” in ClarityAutomate.
In this case, we’re looking to add new content to the page.
This step focuses on the part of the page where the text will be added.
The new text should be added before the existing text.
Then, add in the text before moving on to the second part of the process.
We’re ready to optimize the link, so that’s how we begin the process in ClarityAutomate.
The original text and link are set to be deleted from the page.
This final step specifies the location of the broken hyperlink that will be removed.
You’re ready to push the changes live! A few minutes is all it takes to implement site changes with ClarityAutomate.