My website is over 11 years old.
In that time it's created a lot of links and gone through several reorganizations.
And those reorganizations broke a lot of those links.
If you've ever reorganized your Shopify store's products, collections, or changed your theme, there's a good chance you have some broken links too.
A broken link is where there's a link in your store that goes to a dead-end or missing page. An easy example is where a blog post links to an old product that has since been deleted.
SEO-wise broken links waste your pages power (called page authority in the jargon).
If you have a popular page in your store with 10 links to other pages, and one of those links are broken then you're losing 10% of the power of that popular page.
There are a lot of analogies to describe it but a partially clogged pipe is an easy one to grasp.
Links to your site and links on your site are hugely important to Google and your SEO in-general. They are the core part of their algorithm and the bedrock for all of SEO.
Back to the practical matter of fixing your links.
Every broken link you find in your store that you fix will be an SEO improvement. How much of an improvement will depend on the page's importance but it should be noticeable.
The most time consuming part is finding the broken links, but fortunately that's something that SEO tools can do for you.
I like using Screaming Frog's SEO Spider tool but there are dozens of others you can use. Google's Search Console also has some data on broken links, though you have to work backwards from their data.
Basically what you do with these tools is to have them scan your site. They'll report on pages that weren't found (404 errors). For each of those pages, they should be a way to see which page linked to that broken page. Open that referring page, find that link, and fix it.
It shouldn't take you more than 1-2 minutes per link to fix.
Today would be a good day to Install JSON-LD for SEO if you haven't yet.
You still have a few months before the holiday season. Just enough time to start getting Rich Snippets and beating your competition in the search results.
Or reply and let me know if you'd like a free Structured Data Audit done for your site.
Eric Davis