Why does my site have broken links?

Question: I see items listed in the app's Broken Links page. Why does my site have broken links? And where do they come from?

Answer: When a URL appears in Broken Links, it does not necessarily come from a broken link on your site. It just means that someone tried to visit that URL on your site, but there is no page for that URL, so our app created a redirect for that nonexistent page.

Often the broken links are on an entirely different site, which is the case when the URLs that you see in our app's Broken Links do not match any pages that ever existed on your site. For more on this, see Why am I seeing broken links for pages that never existed on my site?

Or the broken links could be a result of no-longer-existing products: when you remove a page or product and then customers reach the old (nonexistent) page through an old bookmark or an advertisement with the old link.

Or broken links could actually be on your site, either in your content (such as in product descriptions) or due to a bug in your site's theme. The signs that broken links may be inside your site are if many new broken links appear in a short amount of time, or if a particular broken link is continually visited very often (according to the  Visits column in the Broken Links page). In these cases, we recommend checking any links in your site's content, and getting in touch with your theme developer to find out whether there are broken links in your theme code.

Whatever the cause of a broken link, no harm is done to your SEO as long as the nonexistent page has a redirect to an existing page on your site—and our app takes care of that automatically. 👍

For a hands-on guide to how our broken link fixer works and how to customize it, see How can I fix broken links?