Broken links, or "links to nowhere" are periodically encountered by every user of the World Wide Web, who goes from site to site. Thanks to them, site visitors see such a familiar and at the same time unloved "error 404".
Links are the so-called skeleton of the internet. They are the ones who link billions of documents on the World Wide Web. Such documents are not only web pages - they can be individual images, text documents, music files, and any other types of information. With the development of the Internet, the term "broken link" began to appear more and more often on the Internet.
A broken link itself is a link pointing to a non-existent place on the web, be it an entire site, a single page, or a specific file. If the entire Internet is compared to a city map, then a broken link can be represented as a non-existent house number on the map. That is, there is a house on the map, but in life it is not.
Technically speaking, a link is a Uniform Resource Locator. And if this very resource does not exist, then the link is called a bat.
Where do broken links come from?
There are several reasons why broken links appear on the Internet. Among the most common are information obsolescence, technical failure or human error.
The Internet is like a huge living organism that constantly lives and develops. And the page that existed yesterday may be deleted today. There are many reasons for this: it was decided to delete the page for one reason or another; the site could change its structure in such a way that the page to which the link leads has changed its address and is no longer available through the previous link. In the end, the site could simply cease to exist, and the links to it remain.
A technical failure means an incorrect publication of a link, for example, on a forum. Some forums shorten long links and there are times when a user tries to post a correct, working link, and the result is broken.
Finally, the human factor is when a user, when placing a link, types it manually instead of copying it. In case of a typo, a broken link leading to a non-existent site is obtained. By the way, there are people who, using special software, scan the Internet for the presence of such links that lead to other domains in order to register them.
Broken links and search engines
Search engines, such as Google or Yandex, crawl the Internet using links, so if you are the owner of the site, then you should make sure that there are no broken links on your site. Broken links lead "to nowhere" and a large number of such links on the site can lead to some sanctions from search engines, such as a drop in search results for certain queries.
