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Link Types

Broken Links

Glossary  |  3 mins

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A broken link is any link that fails to take a user to the link’s intended destination. Links can become broken for a variety of reasons, such as a website going offline, a page being removed without having a redirect added, or a website’s URL structure being changed.

When a user clicks on a broken link, they’ll see a 404 error page, either generated by the browser in use, or created by the site owners to explain why the content isn’t available. A 404 error is a standardised HTTP status code which indicates that a page doesn’t exist under a given URL, and that the relevant server hasn’t been able to fulfil the user’s request.

Broken links in different contexts are a cause for concern in SEO for two reasons. Firstly, when Google’s crawlers come across broken links within your website, they’ll take them as indicators of a poor user experience, which is cause to lower the site’s rankings. Second, backlinks pointing to your site from other domains are seen as a vote of confidence, and if they start pointing to a page that’s been moved or deleted, it is a lost opportunity.

For both of these reasons, amending and cleaning up broken links is an important part of routine site maintenance within SEO. By regularly checking for broken links, you can improve the context of your site in the eyes of both users and crawlers, and improve your site’s user experience by making content easy for users to find.

Though you may have few or no broken links at the moment, it’s still important to continually check for broken links, due to a phenomenon known as link rot. Link rot refers to the natural tendency for links to cease pointing to the content they originally targeted over time. Due to the dynamic nature of the internet, link targets can frequently disappear due to websites or pages becoming unavailable, or interests in certain types of content shifting.

Broken links within your site can be addressed by updating rather than removing pages, or by using 301 redirects to send users to a replacement page, substituting URLs that show a 404. When a backlink is resulting in a 404 error due to an incorrect URL being used in the link, you may be able to fix it by contacting the relevant webmaster and requesting an update.

Broken links can also be a good source of new and valuable backlinks. Where a site has a broken link pointing to a site other than yours, you may be able to claim that link for your own profile by creating a replacement piece of content and suggesting that the relevant webmaster links to your content instead.

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Broken Links FAQs

What causes broken links?

Broken links can be caused by a number of things, but the most common reasons are target pages being moved to new URLs without a redirect, web pages or sites being removed altogether without a redirect, or typos and other mistakes that occur when the link is first created.

How do I check for broken links?

There’s a range of tools available which you can use to scan your website for broken links. Popular SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Semrush have features that will crawl your site for broken internal links and highlight lost links in your backlink profile that may have been broken. Google Search Console also highlights broken links and other errors.

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SEO

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL)

Glossary  |  3 mins

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL), as the name sounds, describes the most important and sensitive topics online. YMYL topics are broad, but generally involve information that could significantly influence consumer's health, financial situation, safety or wellbeing. There are many such topics that could influence these areas, though are most commonly found on websites that provide advice on subjects such as medicine, finance and current events. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines include E-E-A-T, a method for evaluators to judge whether a page is providing reliable information that consumers can trust, which is never more important with YMYL topics. Google states that evaluators need to use judgement as to whether a page qualifies as YMYL, and if so, these pages need to be demonstrating the highest levels of E-E-A-T. Both E-E-A-T and YMYL are not directly SEO ranking factors, however they do influence the factors that are considered. For instance good quality content will likely attract high quality backlinks, naturally reference many of the most important concepts and keywords in context - whilst hugely influencing time on page and click through rates.

E-E-A-T for YMYL SEO is important to stop the spread of misinformation to:

  • The reader of the page
  • Those affected by the reader of the page
  • Exponential spread of those affected by those who were affected by the reader of the page

Example YMYL topics

  • Side effects of certain prescription drugs
  • Safety advice for natural disasters
  • Self Assessment submission dates

Tips for creating YMYL content

    • Create high quality, people first content that answers questions, provides advices and satisfies the reader’s queries.
 
    • Provide author bio information, as well as complete transparency as to where any information for the content was sourced, with references. Ensure your website has a well populated About page, with all certifications and qualifications of authors clearly displayed.
 
    • Link out to credible sources when citing statistics or relevant opinions within the content.
 
  • Encourage similarly high quality publications within the industry or niche to cite your work as a source, via a backlink. This will help to build topical relevance for your page, as well as building the authority of the author to speak on the subject.
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SEO

E-E-A-T

Glossary  |  3 mins

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness E-E-A-T is an updated acronym, building on Google’s 2014 update to their Search Quality Rater Guidelines ‘E-A-T’. The handbook now features the additional trust factor ‘Experience’, as of the December 2022 update, which helps Google to measure the success of its algorithm updates and search results. Google is adamant that while E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor it does want to serve results that display websites with strong E-E-A-T. In conjunction with SEO, E-E-A-T is a major focus for websites aiming to improve trust, engage customers and lead to an improved conversion rate.

E-E-A-T Timeline:

Mar 2013: Search Quality Rating Guidelines Introduced Mar 2014: E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) added to the guidelines Dec 2022: Updated to E-E-A-T, with the additional ‘E’ for ‘Experience’

Experience

Good quality content should demonstrate an expert level of understanding with subject matter, proving that insights are authentic and ‘tried and tested’. Adding ‘Experience’ to the E-A-T guidelines is a signal that consumers of the content can trust its authenticity.

Expertise

Expertise differs from experience, though there is some overlap. While experience shows a real life understanding of the subject matter, expertise demonstrates a professional connection, through credentials, qualifications and a deep level of knowledge that qualifies authors to provide reliable information.

Authoritativeness

Authoritativeness, like expertise and experience, derives from the same place of being qualified to provide reliable information on a subject matter. Unlike the previous two, however, authoritativeness is reputation based, leveraging the power of industry peers to support your credibility as a trusted source of information. In this sense, authoritativeness is sourced by backlinks and citations from other credible, reliable sources of similar information.

Trustworthiness

In essence, Trustworthiness is the combination of the above and in essence, the most important factor of the E-E-A-T guideline - especially in subjects considered to be YMYL. Raters must consider the content as a whole, the look and feel of the website where the content lives, and the author who created it. Being clear, upfront and honest about who wrote it, its sources and any other factors that may encourage a transaction of conversion from users.
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Authority Metrics

Majestic Link Graph

Glossary  |  2 mins

Majestic Link Graph was introduced in 2020, giving link builders and SEOs a new way to visualise the immediate map of links surrounding a website or URL. By the very nature of the internet, links and link networks are everywhere. Many of them are benign, as Majestic state, such as footer links within corporate subsidiaries or a single website translated into many languages. However, some networks are not so innocent and are designed to manipulate search rankings. These are known as private blog networks (PBNs), and fall under the black hat tactics that white hat link builders avoid at all costs. Due to their malicious intent, PBNs are not always easy to spot and are designed to appeal to marketers for commercial gain. The Link Graph, therefore is a highly useful tool for marketers to quickly get a real time analysis of the top 50 websites that point to a domain or URL. It considers the four tiers stipulated by Majestic (1-4), collecting the top links within each and then calculates which are linking to each other. Whilst the tool is insightful and accurate to a degree, it does not consider all network possibilities, and Majestic provides no guarantee that it is all encompassing. It does however provide an instant insight into the top external links (or lack thereof) that surrounds a website or URL - which in conjunction with other authority metrics can be a vital component in the decision making for link acquisition. The static image provided by the Link Graph is made up of red dots and dark lines - where the dots are websites or URLs, and the dark lines are the links that connect them. The size of the red dot depicts the Trust Flow of the referring domain, while the lighter dots and lines show links that are farther away from the domain in question.
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