Use Case: Auditing broken internal & external links for an online tax return software website

Following the recent launch of our broken internal & external links audit feature, we thought it would be useful to present an example showcasing the main benefits of this feature for website owners and digital agencies.

This use case relates to gosimpletax.com, an online tax return self-assessment Saas that targets the UK market.

The main objectives of this audit:

With this audit, we aim to achieve the following:

• Check the status of hard-coded internal links (correct, redirected, broken..)
• Check the status of hard-coded external links (correct, redirected, broken..)

As you’ll see below, InLinks now provides several options to fix the problematic internal links either individually or at once with 1 click.

Project creation:

We began by creating an InLinks project for this website having the core 203 pages (essentially the 203 pages that bring in the most organic traffic).

We targeted 5 pillar pages with corresponding entities which resulted in the creation of 33 internal link opportunities and a displayed internal linking score of 20.9%.

Auditing hard-coded internal links:

The internal links tab within of the project now displays the ‘Static Internal Links‘ tab, on the 203 pages that were added to this project and crawled by the tool we can see that there are:

• 264 internal links having the 200 code (these are the correct internal links)
• 65 internal links having the 3xx code (these can be the permanently or temporarily redirected internal links)
• 4 internal links having the 4xx code (these can be to pages not found or unauthorized)
• 2 internal links having the 5xx code (these can be to pages with server error)

Check this article which explains the meaning of each status code.

Actions to be taken:

We’ll focus primarily on the internal links having the 4xx and 5xx codes as these are the ones that negatively impact the user experience, upon clicking on ‘FIX‘ next to each link we can either redirect links to a page to another URL or remove the link.

If we want to remove ALL the internal links that are broken (the 4xx and 5xx codes), we shall use the global project switch (as shown on the screenshot below)

IMPORTANT NOTE: For the above changes to be automatically implemented within of a website, the Javascript code of the InLinks project needs to be installed and activated.

Auditing hard-coded external links:

For the hard-coded external links (Static External Links tab) we saw that there are:

• 137 external links having the 200 code
• 53 external links having the 3xx code
• 11 external links having the 4xx code
• 4 external links having the 5xx code

The actions to be taken are similar to the ones highlighted above for the hard-coded internal links EXCEPT removing all broken external links at once.

The takeaway

This feature launched by InLinks aims to help website owners and SEO teams to quickly fix the broken internal & external links and significantly improve the user experience, on a project having thousands of pages you can see that the time that would be saved in manually fixing these issues at scale is quite considerable.

If you’re interested in seeing how this feature would work for any of your websites please book a demo with our team.