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When you’ve been at the blog game for a while, things happen. Posts you wrote about many moons ago have a broken link or two in them. I’ve been blogging for 10 years. You better believe my blog has broken links in it. It is important that you fix broken links on your blog.
How To Find And Fix Broken Links On Your Blog
Why should broken links be fixed?
First of all, think of your readers. Because they love your writing so much, they might be happily reading your archives only to be annoyed by a dead link in your post.
Second of all, think of SEO. Bad or broken links can bring your blog down in SEO value and it’s already hard enough to keep Google happy.
How can you find broken links? Can they be fixed?
If you have a WordPress blog, there is a plug in you can use called Broken Link Checker. Simply install the plug in, activate it, and let it do its magic. It’s free and fairly easy to use. It even has a setting to email you when it finds a broken link.
If you are still using a Blogger blog or some other platform, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to find broken links, but that might require a level of knowledge beyond beginning.
There are a few sites where you can input a site to see if any of the links on it are broken. Brokenlinkcheck.com is a good one, and it’s pretty easy to use. It only processes the first 3,000 pages, so if you’ve been blogging for a while or are just a prolific writer, this might not be enough for you. It can also take a while to process, but the output is pretty clean and easy to read. Of course, you have to go back to your blog to edit out the bad links manually.
Broken affiliate links can be a problem, too. Some affiliate websites have tools to check and see if a link is broken because of an old offer or coupon. Others will alert you with an email that one of the links is no longer good.
Fixing broken links is one of those blog chores that no one really likes, but if you keep up on it, can help your blog with SEO and help your readers easily read your archives.
Keep Reading
Are you looking for more information about blog upkeep? Here are a few posts you’ll find helpful:
- Tips To Speed Up Your Blog Page Load Time
- 15 Best Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
- Does Your Blog Pass The Health Test?
- Five Apps To Increase Social Media Productivity For Bloggers - Dec 15, 2014
- How To Save Money (And Sanity) While Online Shopping This Holiday Season - Dec 3, 2014
- Final Day Of Blogtober: Let’s Get Social With Facebook - Oct 24, 2014
- Blogtober: Let’s Get Social With Google+ - Oct 22, 2014
- Blogtober: Let’s Get Social With Twitter - Oct 20, 2014
- Creating And Selling Printables On Your Blog - Oct 2, 2014
- How To Find And Fix Broken Links - Jul 17, 2014
Ugh – I used the website you suggested and found 35 broken links! Installing the plug in now and getting to work!
I always worry I might have broken links! Thanks for sharing this awesome tool!
Thanks for useful post, i have not heard about this tool for checking broken links
Thank you for this information
I will minimize the use of on my blog ..
Great post. I just installed this WP plugin the other day…have a bit of work to do! 😉
B
http://www.naughteebits.com
Are broken links harmful for seo? Then i have to fix them right away :/
Great advice as usual!
Awesome Ideas. I will check mine too and I feel bad that I have not been able to keep up with getting to the posts daily. I need to try and better my website.
Linda
hi ,
What a great ideas ,
It is very good job my friend .
thank you for posting .
Thank you so much for your informative blog, Marya. I alway learn something new, or have something reinforced. (sigh)
Thanks so much! I found two broken links and one was my email address! This is a great resource!
This is awesome! Thank you so much for this post–I just installed the WP plug-in (never thought of this to be honest) and will wait to see if I get any emails. I imagine I will considering the fact that I have content that goes back quite a few years!
New tool…love it
Just tried out Broken Link Checker and found some things I need to fix on my site. Thanks so much for the tips!
I use broken link checker. It is so easy to use!
Great reminder. I did this a while back (after many years of daily blog posts) and there were hundreds (!) of links to fix. I took care of that batch, but now I’m betting there are hundreds more. It’ll be a summer project, I guess. 🙂 Thanks!
Thank you. I didn’t know about broken link checker and will definitely use it. I had a reader tell me recently there were some broken links and I was so grateful because I didn’t know!! Have a great day.
Wow I need to check my broken links. I’m hoping the have a global replace an old link for a new one. I changed my layout without taking the links into account. I’m on wordpress.
Thanks for the tips.
I use the link checker and when I moved my work blog decoratingheaven.com.au recently to a new server under a different directory folder I had loads of links to fix. You are able to do more than one link at a time. Saves so much work. Fran