Baidu has recently listed all kinds of invalid pages and reminded webmasters to submit them to its tool as soon as possible.
“Those pages would directly affect your website’s indexing and authority,” said Baidu.
Categories of broken links
Protocol broken links
Pages that cannot be accessed, or pages that present obviously invalid content based on HTTP protocol, such as 401, 403, 404, 500 and 503.
Content broken links
Such pages can be accessed normally, but they don’t contain any meaningful information, what they show is content like “The page doesn’t exist”, “Content has been moved”, “Post deleted”, “Hosting closed”, etc.
Blank page
Such pages have empty body with no valid content.
Resource fails
Some thematic pages and intermediate pages have high content quality and provide nice browsing experience, but their downstream resources are not available when visitors click on them. For example, when people click on “Play” button, its downstream videos or audios are dead; when click on “Download” button, the download resource are invalid).
Outdated pages
Products or group purchase on the pages have been out of stock; recruitments or transactional information have expired and thus cannot meet visitors’ demands any more.
Solutions to broken links
- Identify Protocol dead links generated in the past 30 days by using “Abnormal Crawls” tool in Baidu’s search platform
- Crawl all links on your website via a third-party crawler tool, and identify broken links
- Reserve URLs of deleted pages with low-quality content manually or automatically in website operation