It’s quite easy to break your own site or cause a costly crash.
Unfortunately, it’s even easier to unintentionally strangle and stymie your
website’s performance with poor SEO management. Declining search rankings
and search visibility problems can have as much to do with technical
factors as they can with content or keyword research, so it pays to scour
your site for errors and missed opportunities.
Make sure these under-the-radar gaffes aren’t dinging your SEO:
Anchor links without destinations
Anchor links
are bits of code on your page that point to a specific spot elsewhere on
the page, to a point on another page or even to an offsite destination.
Anchor links can be like helpful ushers who steer users directly to
specific information.
Each anchor link on your website should have an “href attribute.” Don’t let that technical-sounding name intimidate you; it just means the
link has to point somewhere. If it doesn’t, you’ve created a broken link,
which will harm your SEO.
Empty links are sometimes placed (and accidentally left) in place by
developers—or anyone tinkering in your CMS—with the intention of eventually
plugging in the appropriate link. Unfortunately, search engines hate dead
ends such as this.
Incomplete or improperly formatted links indicate that a website is
unfinished, hasn’t been updated or isn’t a valuable or reliable source of
information.
In any of these cases, it’s a sign that searchers may have a poor
experience and should not trust the content that’s offered. Why would
Google rank a site like that prominently in its search results?
Repairing broken links isn’t difficult, but it can be time-consuming and
exhausting—especially if you have a large website with lots of pages.
Scouring through reams of code to look for errors and make repairs as you
go is a meticulous process that steals precious time.
Internal links with no valid destinations
If missing anchor links are troublesome and annoying, then incomplete
internal links are even worse.
Like broken anchor links, broken or incomplete internal links can be
remnants of a slapdash development process. They can become problematic if
a page on your site has been moved, had its URL altered or was removed
without
putting a redirect in place. If any of those things happened, and the link wasn’t updated, it’s going
to show as a “missing destination” on your website.
In some cases, links can be classified as broken simply because you or a
member of your development team has marked them as “nofollow,” even if they’ve been set up appropriately elsewhere. This can signal to
search engine crawlers that you’d prefer some parts of your website not to
be accessed—or that you do not want the flow of SEO to continue.
Both internal links and anchor links can be very useful—to you as a
marketer and for your visitors—but they must be set up correctly to provide
SEO value. Otherwise, they detract from the search visibility of your site
and can be frustrating to visitors (and potential customers).
Bad links and other technical mishaps might be difficult to see with the
naked eye, but they can still kill your SEO. Be on the lookout for these
silent SEO killers, or your website could end up getting the Google kiss of
invisibility death.
A version of this post first appeared on the
Kayak Online Marketing blog.