Doh! Broken links!!! Fix Them!
[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series and The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series.]
As we’ve been walking through my series on launching an amazing WordPress Blog I’ve challenged many of you to change some significant areas of your blog, especially if you’ve already got a WordPress-Powered blog in the first place!
Some of those things include permalinks settings as well as blog post slugs which can dramatically increase your SEO as well as end-user usability and site architecture.
Naturally, many of you have asked how to make sure that you don’t end up with many broken links that would impact your user experience and ultimately your SEO!
Well, here’s a sweet WordPress Plugin that can seriously put your mind at ease and help you to fix those internally broken links:
Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin Settings
With Broken Link Checker you can check all your links and URLs to see if they are broken. Not only that you’ll be able to fix them directly through their backend interface!
It’s one sweet plugin that you won’t want to leave home without!
A few advanced settings for you to customize.
Make sure that once you install it you let the system run through all your links. Go to the General Settings and you’ll see it work through the links so just put it in another window or tab in your browser and then go get something to eat (if you have a lot of links to work through).
Finally, you’ll notice that I’ve changed the Timeout marker to be 5 seconds, which is a lot shorter than the value that the plugin inserts on installation. This is simply because I put a premium on fast-loading sites that are linked from my blog which impacts my SEO ranking.
As you can see, these two links have been “caught” as having “timedout”:
Timeout...? Or not...
The thing is that both of these sites actually do end up resolving but not as quickly as I like. This helps me not only understand what is being linked from my blog but the quality of those links, especially in terms of load speed which is a significant factor in SEO now.
My recommendation is that these two bloggers look into their server configurations and/or hosting setups to see if they can significantly decrease their page load time so that we can have an awesome link party between TentBlogger and their site!
And here are 3 examples of links that broken simply because the commenter forgot to spell their link right:
Need to double check the URL spelling!
The first is missing a “/” after “http:/” while the second is obviously missing an “e” in “leaders” and the third is just missing a “/” instead of an “@” symbol.
Did I spend the time to correct them? Absolutely, but that doesn’t mean I appreciate it! Please learn to spell your links!
In anycase, hope this WordPress Plugin helps you out!
So, let’s hear it in the comments: How many broken links did the plugin find on your blog? Be honest!
And, don’t forget to fix all the potential external broken links (404 errors) as well!
[This post is part of the Ultimate Guide to Launching a WordPress-Powered Blog series and The Blogger’s Essential Guide to Search Engine Optimization Series.]
Wow, 36 broken links. Lots from a domain that I do not own anymore. Fixed em though. Thanks for this!
great job!
I had over 30 broken links… but mostly thanks to your SEO plugin
It was nice to be able to find them and fix them.
Agree with Brian. It is good to be able to find the broken links easily from our own blog dashboard.
Thanks for this recommendation, John!
sure thing dude!
nice!
Oh wow…wish I had known about this before I went through all of my posts manually to check for broken links. :-\ I will use it to double-check now, though. Thanks for the recommendation!
Found 57 broken links!! Goes to show doing it manually is imperfect at its best.
nice! sorry for not sharing it earlier…!
I had 4 broken links on my podcast site and 24 on my blog! Thanks for highlighting this plugin. I would have never chased down those broken links otherwise. I love that you can fix them with the plugin too.
i know, right? love the simplicity!
John, I don’t know if you remember the chaos on my blog when I changed my permalink settings. You fixed it by resorting back to the year & month permalink. If I switch it back to just the post title will this plugin fix all the broken links?
you could definitely try.
http://www.GraceGround.com – 0 Broken Links! Yay! (But this is a new site)
http://www.GraceCommentary.com – 0 Broken Links!
http://www.tillhecomes.org – 45 broken links. All fixed now.
well done! feels good, right?
Hi John,
I’m wondering which you prefer and you feel better; this plugin or by using the Google Webmaster?
Coz all this while I use the webmaster tool and now I just started using this plugin right after I read this post
Tq~
i actually use both. i have another post that i’ll share some other insights soon.
Great plugin. I had 29 – several of which were internal!
doh! quick fix.
No broken links!
I try to be very aware of this kind of thing as I’m blogging.
doing awesome!
I had about 25 broken links on my personal blog. This is such a sweet tool! I also used an SEOmoz tool that showed all the 404′s in my site, OUCH. Working on the 301′s since I found about 70 of those.
This month has been all about learning quality for me.
dude, sweet1!
Cool plugin. 37 broken links!
nice job!!
Zero broken links using plugin, but I am so confused because Attracta says I have 10… before I installed the plugin Attracta said I had just 2. I have must have done something really silly.
i’m not familiar with attracta…
Okay, that was embarrassing…*blushes* I’l be sure to double check to see that I spell my site correctly next time! Thanks for fixing it though and I’ll be sure to install this plugin…
…!
3 broken links, all from old comments. Nice plugin. Thanks for mentioning it, John!
that’s it? awesome!
Hi John,
I had about 65 broken links. 3 were 404′s which I was able to fix, but one of them won’t let me fix the problem. It doesn’t bring up the url so I can fix it. Don’t know what that is about.
The other problem is the rest are 403 errors and I don’t know how to fix these. Any suggestions? Thanks, Sally
can you send me a screenshot?
Found 50 broken links. Do you have any suggestions on how to “fix them”. If it is linked to resources on other sites that they have simply just removed from there own site from some reason or another. (Silly people doing that!)
you could contact them or just remove the link. that’s what i usually do.
Broken Links checker however doesn’t check the links if you are using CommentLuv which links to the last blog post the author made. These links tend to get broken a lot and it’s a massive job to find them so you might need to use XENU links checker.
Not to put you off using CommentLuv as it can bring you plenty traffic but at the end of the day I wonder if its worth it. I think the broken links will do more harm than having the extra bit of traffic perhaps?
thanks for this perspective! not a fan of comment luv!
Reading through other posts here – Andy released a separate plugin to find and fix broken CommentLuv links. I don’t know if it’s just for current CL users or if he released it publicly or not *sorry!*
Hi John,
I am so glad I came across this page. However, I am a bit more confused now than I was before found this post.
I REALLY hope you can help me out. I installed the Link Checker plugin and it found 2 broken links (Status: 404 Not Found). These are the links it found: “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003405946138” and “http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003405943523”. The source for both is comments on a post. I am unsure of what I should do.
I also have the SEO Ultimate plugin installed and it continues to find ‘broken’ links. Some of these links I know were broken because I changed the permalink, but I have gone back and manually fixed some of these links. The strangest thing is that SEO Ultimate is finding broken links that really should not be. For example, I made several posts called Lazy Sunday. The address for one of these is, http://lilisnotes.com/lazy-sunday-2 but the plugin is listing as https://lilisnotes.com/2012/04/17/lazy-sunday-2.
The Link Checker did not find, or has not yet found, all the broken links that SEO Ultimate plugin found.
I hope I did not confuse you! My blog is personal, and even though I don’t have a lot of content, I think it’s important that all links are working properly.
Would you be able to give me any suggestions?
Many thanks!
~ Liliana
Hi John,
Thanks for the post. It helps me to fix my broken link.
Hello Jhon,
Assalamu Alaikum,
Thanks a lot for your post. It is very much helpful for everybody who works in SEO jobs as a whole.
Nasir Uddin
Thanks John, just what I was looking for!
I agree. This plugin works fine for my blog. Thanks for detailed explanations with screen shots.