Broken links are hyperlinks, that no longer lead to valid web pages. These links can negatively impact a website's search engine ranking and overall user experience since they lead to a 404 error page. Thankfully, Smart SEO can help you with fixing broken links in your store.
Broken links can occur for many reasons:
The page has been deleted.
The page has been moved, and the link wasn’t updated.
There’s a typo in the URL.
The link is pointing to the wrong page.
In this documentation, you will find details on how to find and fix those broken links through Smart SEO. You can find the Broken Links feature in the left sidebar in Smart SEO.
How to find broken links on your store
On the Broken Links initial page, you will see 3 types of broken links, depending on their source:
On-site broken links - Those are links on your website's pages that don't go to valid pages anymore.
To find these broken links, click the Crawl button:
Smart SEO will then start crawling your website's pages and look for such links on your store that are no longer valid. Depending on what is your plan, you have a given number of broken link pages quota that will be used in the process.
The crawling process might take up to a few hours, depending on the number of pages you have.
404 User Hits - A user hit occurs when someone lands on a 404 error page on your site. Usually, this happens when the link is outside your website, or when the user typed the URL and made a typo. To make sure Smart SEO checks for such events, make sure the status under the 404 User Hits box is Monitoring...
If not, you can click the Activate button to make Smart SEO check and store 404 user hits on your store
Backlinks, broken links - Those are links to your website from external sites, like when a happy customer shares a link to one of your products on Facebook. If you change the product's URL, the link on the Facebook post will lead to a 404 error page, turning the backlink into a broken link. Every week, Smart SEO updates your backlinks information.
The backlinks feature is only available on the Business and Premium plans.
How to fix broken links with Smart SEO
Regardless of their type, all broken links should be fixed. This is done by creating a redirection to a valid page on your store.
To fix a broken link, all you have to do is click the Fix button. This will create a redirection to the homepage:
Or, you can click the Edit button and add the desired URL address where you wish the redirection to lead to and save the change.
Once you save the URL, click the Fix button.
Note that the Repaired URL is a relative link for your store. This means that / will lead to your homepage, /collections/man-tshirts will lead to https://mystore.com/collections/man-tshirts, and so on (where mystore.com is your domain name)
Under the Fixed Links tab, you can see all the broken links that you fixed with Smart SEO, and you may make further changes to the URL redirection if needed.
Archived Product redirects, and deleted products/collections redirects
This feature is only available on the Premium plan.
Even if a product is archived or deleted, Google may still have its URL indexed and show it in search results. Without a redirect in place, clicking that result leads to a 404 - losing both the visitor and any link equity the page had built. Archived product redirects let you point those dead URLs to a relevant page instead.
How to configure Smart SEO to search and fix broken links automatically
The true power of the broken links feature in Smart SEO is in its automation. To configure the automation, go to the Automation tab.
The Broken Links automation feature is available on the Premium plan
Enabling automatic crawling of on-site broken Links will make Smart SEO automatically crawl your website for broken links. And from the Crawl Interval, you can set the interval between the automatic crawling:
Enabling this only makes Smart SEO gather the broken links by crawling and lists them in the Broken Links page. Then you can fix them manually.
And to configure automatic fixing of broken links, enable the Enable automatic fixing of broken Links setting. Smart SEO will then use the redirect URLs you have configured for each type of page to create the redirect:
If you want to add a specific URL redirect to your product, collection, blog, article, or other pages, you can add it below.
Enter only the path, not the full URL - your store domain is already assumed. For example, use /products/my-product instead of https://www.yourstore.com/products/my-product. A single / redirects to your homepage.
For example, you can specify the Collection redirect URL to be /collections, which will redirect the broken links of collection pages to /collections:
Enabling the Redirect to containing collection if a product's broken link and Redirect to containing blog if an article's broken link settings is also useful, as the first one will redirect broken links for products to the product's collection page, rather than the Product redirect URL you have specified. Let's say you have specified the Product redirect URL to lead to /collections/all, which is the page that contains all your products. If you enable the Redirect to containing collection if a product broken link, a product broken link of a product that's in the t-shirts collection will instead be redirected to /collections/t-shirts (as an example)
Redirect to the containing blog if an article's broken link works the same way, but for articles and their blogs
Under the Archived Products Settings, you can configure Smart SEO to automatically redirect archived products to be redirected as soon as you archive them. To do that, enable Enable automatic redirect of archived products
With our Deleted Product/collection redirect settings, you can automatically create redirects when products or collections are deleted from your store. As we already mentioned, without a redirect in place, clicking that result leads to a 404 - losing both the visitor and any link equity the page had built.
We also have the option to overwrite existing redirects and to add a default redirect URL
We also provide the option for traffic scoring. Traffic Scoring controls which types of visitors are counted when a broken link is hit. By default, Smart SEO counts real visitors and search engine crawlers - the two sources that actually matter for your store's SEO and user experience. Known bots and scrapers can be excluded to keep your data clean and focused on genuine traffic.
Don't forget to save the changes:
Now, Smart SEO will handle the broken links of your store.