Worried About Broken Links

[naturalsociety]

In Wordpress, I'm using a plugin called Broken Link Checker to check for broken links.

Should I be worried about/spend time fixing outbound links that result in:

• 403 Forbidden

-Server Not Found

-Timeout

-500 Internal Server Error

-etc.

Thanks for your help!

• Mike

[NickW816]

I would recommend cleaning them up. You can also try https://brokenlinkcheck.com/, which is free to use and crawls your whole website. Having broken links is bad for users and also is a bad signal for Google for your website's helpfulness.

[pilesofpillows]

Yes it is best practice to fix or replace those broken links on your website. Having broken links can cause you to lose trust with a user, seem dated, and possibly lose some authority with Google.

[naturalsociety]

Thanks for the responses guys! I did specify numerous statuses because not all of them actually lead to broken links. For example, a lot of the links appearing as 'server not found' actually work.

This link for example works, but is rendering the 'server not found' status by Broken Link Checker. (Actually, ever link from this source comes up with a 'server not found' status, but they all work.)

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/05/16/kentucky-takes-dea-to-court-over-illegal-hemp-seed-seizure

Any insight?