SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has too much importance to get targeted visitors on your blog.
Every blogger wants huge traffic on their blog and good ranking in Google SERP. Google have become so much unpredictable these days that following important the guidelines have become so much important for webmasters.
When Google launched the algorithms like Panda/Penguin updates they wanted to combat low quality blogs which had build wrong backlinks or had too much broken links on their blog.
Google is launching these updates to deliver quality at the end user. So if there is any 404 error at your blog, then this is wrong thing from the Google's prospective.
When a user is accessing your blog's url and if there is 404 error, you failed to deliver the content which he/she was looking.
So we must check our blog if there is any broken link present or not.
These are the sites to check your Broken links.
- xenulink
- dead-links.com
- linktiger.com
- www.brokenlinkcheck.com
- www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker
You can check your url here and see if there are some broken links at your blog.
How these broken links comes?
There are two main reasons for the broken links.
- Page/Post is no more existing at your blog.
- Link in your comments are not existing (Person who commented on your blog might have deleted his/her blog)
You can check all the broken links with the site mentioned above.
How to Remove Them?
Download Broken Link Checker Plugin from WordPress Repository.
Features of this plugin
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don't work, missing images and redirects.
- Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
- You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
- Links can be edited directly from the plugin's page, without manually updating each post.
After installation of this plugin this will check the links on regular basis and notify you when there is any broken link on your blog.
You can do all setting of this plugin in Setting > Link Checker
Here is screenshot from my blog.
You can check you broken links from Tools > Broken Links
Select all the links and click unlink them.
Do the setting properly so that this plugin will scan your website accordingly.
Keep checking for broken links and always unlink them if there is any.
Final Words !!
Finally I would like to say that if you haven't used this plugin then go and install this plugin to save your blog from Google penalty.
Share your thoughts in comments.
You can ask questions if there is any.
Hi Kulwant, I use plugin called broken links for the very purpose. Its highly effective
Broken Link Checker is a great plugin. But the problem that many people face is that sometimes it becomes resource extensive and consumes hell lots of cpu memory. I feel xenu is a better tool for detecting broken links.
I don’t know if it consume CPU memory or not. For sure I will see this and update it in post.
I will check the tool you mentioned here.
Thanks for adding value in article.
after finding broken links…cant we can just put an nofollow html tag on the brokenlinks instead of deleting them? will it effect the SEO?
Nishant, deleting 404 error links is a better option. There is no reason to make them nofollow because Google have detected them as broken.
I am sure that this list will be very helpful regarding Broken Links. But Just to Be curious, what if i don’t pay attention to Broken Links, can they affect my Blog Traffic and PageRank?
It will affect both your traffic and well as PageRank.
Because Google will consider your blog as low quality blog and you will not get good ranking on Google SERP. And in short you will lose traffic.
And as your blog is having many broken links so this will affect your PR too.
Broken link checker is a great plugin for finding broken links. I have already installed it on my blog.
Great work Hariharakumar.
Nice tut bro
I’m getting this done on my blog right away
I really appreciate this and thanks for sharing
I loved to see you again on my blog.
This is one of the must use plugin for every blog, because broken links can cause negative SEO on your blog.
Share the number of broken links you found on your blog.
Thanks for sharing the information, just going to use the WP plugin to ensure that everything is correct in my blog. The situation may occur if you have changed from blogger to WordPress too.
Rajkumar Share with us that how many broken links you found on your blog.
Is there any way to check the broken links for blog which is on BlogSpot ? As I am on Blogspot and no such plugins are there 🙁 🙁 (:
Sorry no idea about Blogspot.
Thanx for this wonderful post !
i was not really aware of this thing and the bad effects of broken links !. ! actually google analytics claime that my 300 links are broken and now im able to correct them ! thanx to you!
Happy to hear that you are now going to remove your broken links. Keep visiting Harshi.
I use WP Broken link checker to deal with such broken links.
BTW: Nice design. Can you share the theme with me (IF it’s premium theme, atleast tell me the name of the theme)
Sadek, This is a Genesis child theme designed by me.
thanks for the tip to fix broken Links
As i am a newbie Blogging field, , I was really worried how to fix broken links in WordPress.
Thanks a lot, I have learned a lot from your Blog!!
Broken links are such a part which most of the newbie don’t understand.
Good to hear that this article helped you Murtaza.
Keep visiting us for more tips.
Thanks for appreciation. Broken link checker is one of the must have plugin.
I have question regarding with broken link, my blog in the firstly used url like this mydomain.com/2013/01/article.html all my backlink pointing to this url.
and then i have changed the url to mydomain.com/article.html and i am used redirect 301 permanent to redirect my old url
My question how affect the backlink to new url? and the affect will be lost or not? please advice from you
thank you
Riska, If you have done 301 redirect then no need to worry.
Great to hear that about this plugin, because I didn’t know about this plugin before.
Thanks for sharing because I think My search engine ranking is going down just because of Broken links.
Hope you have fixed your blog till now with this plugin.
Hi Kulwant, I saw your effective suggestion, thanks for shearing that with us.
I have many 404 crewel error in my webpage, how could I fixed that, please could you suggest me some idea for this regarding matter?
Hi Surya,
Sorry for replying late.. If you are getting too many 404 errors then try analysing your blog and check the root cause. Further you can remove those URL from search engines by submitting from Google web-master tool.
Wow, great article Kulwant.
I am sure like many others too ignore this aspect of blogging. After following this article I have unlinked almost 70 broken links on my blog.
Keep sharing such informative articles my friend.
Happy to see you, Kunal. Yeah, even I was amazed when I used this plugin first time.
Keep visiting to get such information. 🙂