Find Broken Links From Your Blog/Website
A good webmaster will always maintain his/her blog/website in the best functioning stage. But things change over time. So does your blog/website. How do you know whether your blog/website has broken links or not? If you are a webmaster, it is your duty to find out and fix those broken links. Imaging you are visiting a blog/website, you click on a broken link, you probably get annoyed by that. If you get really frustrated with that, you probably won't come back to that site any more. So broken links are not friendly to your visitors. Certainly they are not search engine friendly either and will negatively affect your page-rank.
I know it is the fact that during my migration from an old host to a new host, my blog was down for a couple of days; I lost visitors significantly. So it is very important that you find and fix the broken links from your blog/website. If you have Google Webmaster Tools account, go to Diagnostics/Web crawl/Not found, you'll find out your broken links in seconds. Alternatively you can check out W3C Link Checker and Xenu. Both of them are Free for use.
How Can You Fix Those Broken links?
If the broken links are internal, then you just have to find your time to fix them. If your blog/website is big, it could be time-consuming for that but it is fixable. However, if the broken links are external, then you have no controls of them. What can you do then? You may consider the three choices below:
- Create a 404 friendly page so your visitors can find the relevant contents;
- Create a 301 permanent redirect so your visitors can find the similar contents;
- Ask the external site owners to fix the broken links for you; find their emails to let them know that their urls pointed to your blog/website are broken and need to be fixed.
A good webmaster should check the broken links from his/her blog/website every month. If you do so, things will be a lot easier.
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