How to solve outbound broken links? Those don't exist now?

[bondhoward]

There are many, many broken links on the website. What normal strategy to use for that?

http://www.txacspecialist.com/air-conditioning-equipment-service-austin/american-standard/

It's an AC site, so all the links to AC vendors who have changed their product pages, all of those links are broken

So for instance, the carrier 20xl doesn't exist anymore. Now they sell the carrier 45abp. We link carrier 20xl and now the page and AC model is not exist. So what I can do to solve the broken link issue?

[DirkC]

The best way is to use a crawler like Screaming Frog to detect all broken external links. These links need to be corrected, because it's bad for user experience, and if it's bad for the user experience, it bad for SEO as well.

If the main reason of broken links is like the example above, because the products you mention on the page don't exist anymore, you will have to update each of these pages, not only removing the links, but also updating the description and putting links to the newer products.

The question is if linking to your suppliers is a wise idea from a business perspective. You probably do a lot of efforts to get visitors to your site, and when they are trying to decide which product to buy, you send them over to the site of the supplier. Once they are on the supplier site you can only hope that they will get back to you once they make the decision which one to buy.

Personally, I think your site would offer more added value if you would list the main products on your own site and add some value, like you would do if somebody would visit a physical store (which is the best model to choose, the difference between brand A/B, which A/C to choose on which budget, ...etc).

rgds,

Dirk

[eglove]

There's no easy way to deal with a ton of broken links. The best thing you can do is to just work through them one at a time. In fact, use it as an opportunity to link to the new products and write up a new post on that update.

If you have a lot of broken links, it'll take awhile of course so just take it in chunks and make sure to do consistent audits in the future.