Broken links are bad and can negatively effect the visitor’s experience on your blog and Google’s PageRank. These are important factors to your blog’s success, so listen up to today’s Daily Task.
Task: Check for broken links throughout your blog
A broken link is basically a link within your blog that leads to nowhere. You have heard of the “Bridge to Nowhere“, now think of a link to nowhere.
If you are the visitor this can be frustrating to click on a link for more information only to find a 404 page or some other problem. If you are the source of credit it will be extremely frustrating when an article writes about you or something you created and then the link does not actually take them to your blog/site. This might even violate your legal rights to use some images or icons under the Creative Commons terms of use.
If you are the bot (think software robot) scanning your blog and come across a broken link you will negate the blog’s authority as well. Perhaps the slap on the wrist will come in the form of a lower PageRank or less visitors from the search engine. If this is Google doing this, you could be in real trouble!
Instructions: Use the following web tools to find and then fix all of the broken links on your blog.
WP Plug-in: Broken Link Checker is easy to use and allows you to find and fix bad links quickly. From the ease of putting the plug-in on your blog to the many features, it is by far the easiest way for Wordpress users to check and fix bad links.
Features
- Checks your posts (and pages) in the background (whenever the WP admin panel is open ).
- Detects links that don’t work and missing images. Checks both internal and outbound links.
- Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
- Link checking intervals can be configured.
- New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
Web based: If you don’t have Wordpress and you still want to check for broken links just go to Dead Links. The only challenge with using this tool is you are limited in search #’s. There may be more broken link checkers available though, so just search Google.
Also if you find other great plug-ins or web tools put them in your comments below!
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Broken links can be killer when you get tons of visitors. Thanks for providing a link to the plugin!