Broken links are nothing more than links inside your website that point to pages that don’t exist. This includes both links to pages inside your own website and links to pages on other websites. What is the cause of a broken link? The maybe the page you linked to existed in the past but got deleted, maybe you simply used the wrong URL when creating the link. Regardless of the reason, whenever a user clicks on one of those links he will see a frustrating 404 error page.
It is easy to see how broken links can negatively affect the user experience inside your site. Apart from annoying your human visitors, though, broken links also upset search engine bots, and if your site has too many of them, your search rankings might suffer. This is because Google will assume that any website with a large amount of broken links is a poor quality or abandoned website.
For these reasons it’s recommended that you check for broken links on your site at least twice a year.
Now if you have a large blog or website it would be impossible to check all the links manually right? Luckily there is a great tool that you can use for this purpose, called Xenu’s Link Sleuth, or simply Xenu.
Don’t worry. You won’t need to pay anything. Just download it and install on your computer (it only runs on Windows). The design of the site is horrible, but it is a legitimate project.
Once you have the tool running, just type the URL of your website and it will start crawling all the links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, and so on.
You will be able to follow the process, and in the end you will see a report with all the broken links, redirects, valid URLs and more.
It is really a nifty piece of software, and a must have on the tool-belt of any webmaster.
It is easy to see how broken links can negatively affect the user experience inside your site. Apart from annoying your human visitors, though, broken links also upset search engine bots, and if your site has too many of them, your search rankings might suffer. This is because Google will assume that any website with a large amount of broken links is a poor quality or abandoned website.
For these reasons it’s recommended that you check for broken links on your site at least twice a year.
Now if you have a large blog or website it would be impossible to check all the links manually right? Luckily there is a great tool that you can use for this purpose, called Xenu’s Link Sleuth, or simply Xenu.
Don’t worry. You won’t need to pay anything. Just download it and install on your computer (it only runs on Windows). The design of the site is horrible, but it is a legitimate project.
Once you have the tool running, just type the URL of your website and it will start crawling all the links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, and so on.
You will be able to follow the process, and in the end you will see a report with all the broken links, redirects, valid URLs and more.
It is really a nifty piece of software, and a must have on the tool-belt of any webmaster.
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