Remember, not everyone makes their content accessible to the rest of the web. The resource you are linking to sits behind a firewall that prevents access to the content.
There is any number of reasons why someone would take their page, or site, down. Older studies show that the average lifespan of a webpage is 100 days.
When you click on a link you expect to visit another webpage, view an image, open a PDF file, etc. Quite simply, a broken link is a link that doesn’t take you to the expected resource. Technopedia defines a broken link as, “ a hyperlink which is linked to an empty or non-existent external webpage.” Broken links are also called dead links. However, before we dive any deeper it is important to understand what a broken link is. Some of the bigger companies had numbers even higher than that: The average number of broken links per site was 2.4%.
In a test run against a subset of the websites of the S&P 500, Link Tiger found that all of the sites had broken links. The information provided here will help you make sure that there are no broken links on your site and help you deal with broken links that should be bringing visitors to your site.
This short article will help you understand what broken links are, what causes them, the harm they do, how to find them and then how to fix them. Imagine finally finding the information you need only to be denied because of a broken link. Not only are broken links bad for a number of reasons, but they frustrate visitors. So, if links are broken, a visitor has no way of moving to the other resource. Essentially, the web is named as such because of the ability for pages and sites to link to other sources and relevant information.