Broken links are links that lead to pages that do not exist. When clicking on a broken link, you land on a "404 error" page, which indicates that the requested URL doesn’t exist. These pages are a nuisance for people browsing your site and can have negative effects on your search engine rankings, so it's important to take care of broken links.

Thankfully, if you want to test your site for broken links, there are a variety of online tools that can check (saving you from going through every page on your site and manually clicking each link). If you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, they offer an easy-to-use diagnostic tool that will check this for you.

Check for broken links using Webmaster Tools (create an account for free if you do not already have one):

• Log into Webmaster Tools
• Click "Health" and then "Crawl Errors"

Google will then provide information on URLs that it could not successfully "crawl", or that returned an HTTP error code. Maintain any pages that come back as broken to give your site visitors and search engines a better experience.

For more information, check out the MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog article, Check Your Site For Broken Links.

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