So why do you need to fix broken site links? Bascially those links may be hurting your chances of ranking. Links on your site are important, as they help your customers move around the site. You could be using to links to direct readers to:
- related info to somethign your talking about on the page,
- other services you offer,
- useful extra info or resources
The links on your site may also point to external sites (a site that isn’t yours) and these are the ones that are more likely to change over time. Companies cease trading, websites change page addresses and don’t always set up redirection leaving you with links that’s don’t go anywhere or are broken site links.
So why check for broken links ?
Consider your potential customers experience of your site, If they visited your site and keep facing links that don’t go anywhere or don’t go where they expect the go. What if you send them off to a site that no longer exists – will they come back to your site?
From the perspective of Google – they likes sites that are updated and having lots of broken site links on your site makes Google think you don’t care which will count against you.
How can you check for broken site links
Well you could go through your site, clicking every link – making sure it goes to the right page? The right site? The right information? Now this isn’t such a big job, if you’ve only got a small web site – it becomes a bigger job if you’ve been writing blogs, have hundreds of pages, or product page etc. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time.
There’s a number of sites that can check your links for you (and in a fraction of the time it would take you).
www.brokenlinkcheck.com and www.deadlinkchecker.com are just two of the ones I have tried. They are free but depending on your site you may find you need to check it more regularly. So you can upgrade and get you site checked automatically.
So when you have a list of Broken site links what then?
The report you get will tell you which page the link is on and where it points to – hopefully from that info you can work out which link it is.
You then need to look at the link and decide why it’s not working.
- Is the link written in wrongly?
- Does it point to a page that’s been moved?
- Is the site no longer there?
Time to correct the link.
If it’s a page on your site. Then just change the link to the right page or another one?
If the link is to a company or site that no long exists or a resource that’s no longer there, then can you find it on another site or page? If not, still remove the actual link (you can leave it just as written text if you need to) or remove it from the site.
Don’t forget to rerun the report to make sure all your links are now working.
Broken link checking is part of the service I offer for WordPress site maintenance but even if your site isn’t on WordPress and you need some help contact Pippas Web.