Broken links are the most irritating and annoying in any blog posts both for the readers as well as for the search engine. This will ultimately reduce the reputation of a blog as well as poor user experience and loss of search engine favor.
As a good blogger you must always ensure that the links you have posted are not broken. Thus, its a good idea to review and fix the broken links regularly. Though this is very necessary, the task of fixing broken links is not a delicious piece. You might have pointed to your won posts, the links to other blog posts or resources on the net and you never know when they are removed or the URL is changed. Thus, it is a good idea to implement some tools that would monitor your links and inform you.
Here I will be talking about how you can be smart to provide your readers with updated and working links if you are hosting in WordPress platform.
Know which links are broken
Manually, it will hardly be possible to keep note of all the links you have posted over a time and get sufficient leisure to check if all of them are still working. Thanks to the Broken Links Remover by Rajesh that works for you smart! Install the plug-in, configure settings and review in regular intervals.
When you have this plugin, its never difficult to track your links and fix them. The following screen shoot displays how it collects the broken links and allows you easy access to fix them!
Click on Bad Links option under the Tools menu if you have installed Remove Bad Links plugin to get the Broken Links Management screen as displayed above. This page lists all the bad links along with their link status codes. To go to fix those bad links all you have to do is click on the Post ID. It will take you to the Edit Post page where you can easily update the link to the new working one.
What to do for broken links until they are fixed?
You can choose two different actions you prefer when a user clicks or search engine that follows a broken link – 1. Redirect to your homepage or 2. Remove the link that are broken.
Redirect to Home Page
If you wish the users or search engines to be redirected to home page when they access a broken link, you can install yet another useful plugin called, Link Juice Keeper by Daniel.
Link Juice Keeper is a WordPress plugin, which helps you to keep the link juice by redirecting all non-existing URLs which normally return a 404 error to the blog front page using 301 redirect.
As you probably know, incoming links play important role in ranking well in Google and other search engines. Therefore you should assure that every incoming link leads to one of pages on your blog. This may be a challenge, because World Wide Web is dynamic and changes every day:
- you can remove some posts or pages on your blog;
- you can change URL scheme on whole blog;
- incoming links may became broken (e.g. due to some automatic text formatting);
- someone may simply put wrong (broken) link somewhere.
All of the above leads to link juice waste. You can avoid this by using this WordPress plugin. It redirects all non-existing URLs which normally return a 404 error to the blog front page using 301 (permanent) redirect. This way everyone who comes to your blog via broken link (both people and robots) will be redirected to the front page.
Pretty convincing, isn’t it? Why not to accept some juice in this hot dry day!
Click Here Download the Plugin!
Remove the broken link
You have already installed Broken Link Remover by Rajesh. This works great if you wish to remove those links and display only anchor text. Go to the settings page and configure there which type of broken links you wish to remove. Look at the following screen shoot:
Make your links error free and Happy Blogging!
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this post really will help to lots of people who just shifted from Blogger to WordPress and changed their Permalinks from “domain.com/year/month/post.html ” to “domain.com/post.html” which will eventually opens a 404 error..
so this broken Link remover really works.. and also we can use 301 redirect. to using a “Redirection” another WordPress plugin too.. to redirect broken links to proper destination..
and if we are lazy you can simple use ‘Link Juice Keeper” which will redirect 404 error to home page..which
Twitter: cartercole
says:
you can now also use the top pages on OpenSiteExplorer they just opened it up and it will show you the strongest pages on the site and their http status codes so you can find 404s and bad redirects
Carter Cole@SEO Developer´s last blog ..The external keyword data that Google Webmaster Tools doesn’t publish
Twitter: icttrends
says:
You have pointed out a great tool for webmasters. I immediately looked for http://www.icttrends.com. I wondered the amount of information it listed. Thanks a lot for sharing nice tool.
Twitter: Ileane
says:
Hi Suresh,
This is important information about fixing broken links. It’s great advice to download the plug-in and I’ll see if we can get this over at Blogging Wire.
Thanks!
Ileane´s last blog ..Diigo Extension for Google Chrome Browser
Twitter: bollyinfozone
says:
hey thanks for information really i don’t know about this i thought once if a link is broken then we can’t fix them and now i got to know.…
Aahna´s last blog ..Badmaash Company full Boxoffice Collection
Twitter: icttrends
says:
In fact, it is the solution by redirecting to the current correct link. But you need some tool that would tell you which links are broken and would allow you to fix them.
the strongest pages on the site and their http status codes so you can find 404s and bad redirects