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SEMRUSH Audit - Showing lots of Internal Links Broken

by vegaspro
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I'm trying to drill down and get my Site Audit to be better than 72% but it seems SEMRUSH is detecting that our site has 283 internal links that are broken: http://s1.postimg.org/l0t336tm7/screen.png

But when we click the URLS link (blacked out for privacy) the pages load fine and there are no errors.

Does anyone know what these 503's mean and how to clean this up so that SEMRUSH Site audit can improve?

Thank you!
#audit #broken #internal #links #lots #semrush #showing
  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    To be completely clear, Google doesn't care about your semrush audit.

    As far as the links, you blacked them out. I have no way of assisting you figure out whats going on. I've never seen that happen before in SR so there might be an issue.

    Edit: If you're not going to provide the links or the site, you will need to provide as much information as you are willing to and somebody might be able to help you. So: are these pages getting google traffic, are they ranking, are they cached, are you sure your server isn't trash? 503 is Server Unavailable, so if your server is trash then that's a pretty serious SEO issue. Do the exact same URLs show up 503 every time you run the report?

    More ideas: does your site use mod_rewrite, do you have different robots.txt or .htaccess files, is the problem localized to a specific folder? Does your site have a "members area" where a session_id is required to navigate those pages? Are you using a CDN, are all of the pages on the same domain or spread across subdomains? Are you using a custom mem cache config? I could do this for days honestly nobody is going to be able to answer your question without just seeing the site.
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    • Profile picture of the author paulgl
      Broken links or 503?

      503 error is different. Your whole site wouldn't show,
      most likely.

      If you have 503 errors, you have server interference or something.

      Real broken links are not a problem unless you care about the pages they point to.

      There is no way I would ever have a broken link to a page I care about.
      So no internal broken links for me, unless I delete something without
      making note of it.

      External broken links are part of the business. People are human, they make errors.

      But the 503 error is deadly. Get it checked ASAP.

      Paul
      Signature

      If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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    • Profile picture of the author vegaspro
      Originally Posted by irawr View Post

      To be completely clear, Google doesn't care about your semrush audit.

      As far as the links, you blacked them out. I have no way of assisting you figure out whats going on. I've never seen that happen before in SR so there might be an issue.

      Edit: If you're not going to provide the links or the site, you will need to provide as much information as you are willing to and somebody might be able to help you. So: are these pages getting google traffic, are they ranking, are they cached, are you sure your server isn't trash? 503 is Server Unavailable, so if your server is trash then that's a pretty serious SEO issue. Do the exact same URLs show up 503 every time you run the report?

      More ideas: does your site use mod_rewrite, do you have different robots.txt or .htaccess files, is the problem localized to a specific folder? Does your site have a "members area" where a session_id is required to navigate those pages? Are you using a CDN, are all of the pages on the same domain or spread across subdomains? Are you using a custom mem cache config? I could do this for days honestly nobody is going to be able to answer your question without just seeing the site.
      Thanks for your response! While I was waiting for a response I opened a ticket with my data center (we have a dedicated server) and they said the following:

      "I optimized your Apache configuration and set worker_connections in Nginx configuration to 8000. Let me know if it helps."

      This lowered the amount of internal broken links in semrush audit to 120. Not sure why or how. Over my head.

      And to answer you, yes there is a htaccess file that has lots of 301 redirects within the site (previous SEO did this).

      May I ask what you meant about Google not caring about our site audit?
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      • Profile picture of the author paulgl
        Originally Posted by vegaspro View Post


        May I ask what you meant about Google not caring about our site audit?
        3rd party shtuff is not even known to google.

        If someone 301'd a bunch of pages, that was nonsense. Why not just
        delete the links? There is no reason to have a link to an old page anywhere
        on your website. This only happens when people use bloated CMS
        programs like WP, or cases of laziness and oversight.

        But again, 503 is not a broken link. It's a broken piece of server,
        blocking or jamming things.

        Paul
        Signature

        If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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        • Profile picture of the author vegaspro
          Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

          3rd party shtuff is not even known to google.

          If someone 301'd a bunch of pages, that was nonsense. Why not just
          delete the links? There is no reason to have a link to an old page anywhere
          on your website. This only happens when people use bloated CMS
          programs like WP, or cases of laziness and oversight.

          But again, 503 is not a broken link. It's a broken piece of server,
          blocking or jamming things.

          Paul
          Thank you Paul. Would those 503's happen if the server is unable to fetch the pages for whatever reason (memory, theme errors)?

          Regarding the htaccess, I see a bunch of these, for example:

          Redirect 301 /eco-friendly-green-home-design/featured-project-1870s-log-cabin/ http://www.xxxxx.com/1870s-log-cabin-restoration

          Not sure the reason behind that.
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