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Unique Broken Links

All instances of links with unique anchor text and target URL, where the target URL returns a broken status code (400, 404, 410, 500, or 501).

Priority: Critical

Impact: Negative

What issues it may cause​

  • Broken links can result in a bad experience for users if they click the link and arrive at the broken page, resulting in poorer engagement and potential loss of conversions.

  • Search engines may waste crawl budget to crawl the broken page or check if the page has been fixed, which could be better used on other pages.

How do you fix it​

If there are broken pages that are found in the web crawl (linked from a page discovered by following links from the starting URLs) then the links should be removed or updated to point to a URL which returns a working page.

What is the positive impact​

Visitors will have a better user-experience and a potentially lower rate of bounce back to search results if they do not experience any broken pages during their visit, which may positively impact the rankings and increase traffic.

Crawl budget spent crawling the broken pages may be reduced, allowing crawl budget to be used on more important pages, or save on server costs.

How to fetch the data for this report template​

You will need to run a crawl for report template to generate report. When report has been generated and you have crawl id you can fetch data for the report using the following query:

query GetReportForCrawl($crawlId: ObjectID!, $reportTemplateCode: String!) {
  getCrawl(id: $crawlId) {
    reportsByCode(
      input: {
        reportTypeCodes: Basic
        reportTemplateCodes: [$reportTemplateCode]
      }
    ) {
      rows {
        nodes {
          ... on CrawlUniqueLinks {
            anchorText
            urlTo
            urlToTitle
            primaryUrlFrom
            primaryUrlFromTitle
            instanceCount
            primaryUrlFromDeeprank
            urlToDeeprank
            urlToStatusCode
            urlToDeeprank
            primaryUrlFromStatusCode
            primaryUrlFromDeeprank
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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