When Did You Last Check Your Broken Links?
February 25th, 2008
How often do you check for broken links within your website? If you don’t check for them then I think you are mad and why would I think that?
Most, if not all, sites/blogs require maintenance checks and this would include checking for broken links. Some people check them at different intervals but if my site or blog is constantly changing I prefer to run spot checks quite regularly, at least once or twice a month.
You can use a free tool such as Link Sleuth that can quickly scan web pages and come back with a status code report on the links. You can find a list of status code definitions that may appear on the report here.
Why bother checking for broken links?
When (not if) a broken link appears on your site or blog it effects 3 things, your visitors, the page/site you are linking to and the search engine bots.
The Visitor
We’ve all been there before. We run a search, found related content, read the content, and clicked a link within the page but only to find a dead URL that leaves us in a state of disappointment. It’s actually a personal hate of mine, clicking on a broken link that is, and I’m sure many other internet users hate it also. Having broken links on our sites isn’t visitor friendly so it’s the most important factor why we should be checking for them regularly.
The Page Or Site Being Linked
Links are the glue of the internet, without them most pages wouldn’t be found on the internet. If we have broken links on our sites we are not helping other pages & sites be more easily found so again, it’s important to check.
The Search Bots
When search engines bots crawl the web they use links to hop from one page to other or from one site to another, as I said links are on-line glue. It’s not being search engine friendly when links are broken and the bots are unable to continue the path you’ve laid out on your site. Having broken links on a page may or may not (assuming here) affect the search engine rankings for that page but they would certainly lower the quality score in regards to both visitors (again) and search engines.
If you haven’t done so already download Link Sleuth and run it. It’s very simple to use and yet very effective for finding broken links. The bigger your site or blog is the longer the crawl will take, be patient.
Entry Filed under: Accessibility
6 Comments Add your own
1. Dave Davis | February 26th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Have you tried:
http://www.linktiger.com/
Automates everything and checks every few days. Sends you and email when it finds broken links
2. Gavin | February 26th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Now that looks to be a handy tool, would save me loads of time running manual checks.
Cheers for the link Dave, I need to automate more of my work.
3. Ivan | JobsBlog.ie | February 27th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
Broken links you say?…. I just changed the Permalink Structure in the WordPress on my blog. The result? All internal links to posts broken!
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
4. Gavin | February 27th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
I’ve done that before Ivan.
Just had a check on your site and it all looks sorted. What Permalink structure are you using? Your output looks different from most others.
5. Ivan | JobsBlog.ie | March 3rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
The links that WordPress generates are OK. But what is not is the following:
1. Google Cashe – has all old links – that show 404 now links like jobsblog/ie/jobs/date/blogpost
2. All the links between the posts that had the same structure as above 9referenes from one article to the other) – all showing 404 as well!
I decided to use jobsblog.ie/post title/ID as the URL for the posts themselves. Just got bored with dates in the URLs.
Ivan | http://www.JobsBlog.ie
6. Gavin | March 5th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Looks as if they have update the cache to reflect your changes.
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