3 Reasons Why You Should Fix A Broken Link And How To Do It
Fixing broken links on your website is crucial as it could hurt your search engine ranking. While the process may take a lot of time to accomplish, especially when you have hundreds to thousands of contents on your sites already, you will find this necessary to do if you want to maintain good ranking and improve your website’s loading time.
Here are top 3 reasons to convince you that you should fix broken links on your site.
1. You need valid links to help search engine spiders navigate through your site
It is an SEO strategy to make sure that your site is friendly for the search engine spiders to visit. If your site display valid links it is easier for the spiders to crawl and index your site for better page views. Broken links make it difficult for the spider to index your site.
2. Updating links on your site allows the spider to re-index your site
Your web page gets better visibility when you update your links as the spider could easily detect any changes you made on your website and it will re-index it again. Regularly updating your site by removing broken links gives the search engine the signal that your website is well maintained.
3. Broken links make affect your site’s reputation
If you re-direct your customers or readers through a broken link from your website it will give them the impression that your site is not a reliable source to use. This affects your site’s reputation and credibility and may eventually result to less numbers of visitors.
Now that you understand how broken links could hurt your site and its reputation you need to learn the basic steps on how to fix the broken links on your site using these quick and easy steps.
4. Plan it out
In order to save you the time and effort to look for any broken links, you need to know which areas of your website where you will likely find them. Broken links are always found on comments, guest bloggers link and permalinks on your own website. You can start your search from here where broken links are very common and you can proceed in looking for other areas of your site for more broken links to fix.
5. Use Google webmaster tool
This is an efficient tool offered by Google to help webmasters prevent spiders from indexing broken links on their website. It helps Google remove 404 web pages from its search result by submitting the broken links using the webmaster tool. Click here for easy tutorial.
6. Edit posts directly
This is a bit of a time consuming process but is useful if you have only a few content on your website. Some broken link finder software may often mistaken one link as broken even when it is actually not in certain conditions such as when the site is upgrading or experiencing a temporary downtime process. It is better to manually check each link on your site to make sure that it is really an invalid link.
7. Use Google Analytics
This is a free tool used to track down the performance of a website. You can set the analytic to look for a broken link every month. You can also receive an email about the report of broken links on your site from Google Analytics. You can export the details of the broken links found on your website.
This makes your task easier as the software will automatically search for the broken links on your website and provide you a detailed report. Click here for tutorial
8. For WordPress Users
If you are using WordPress, you will find several plugins available to check for invalid links on your site. It makes it convenient for you to correct, remove or change broken links directly from your dashboard.
There are other plugins that are designed to identify a broken link from comments and blogs like the Akismet antispam plugin. Just hover over the comment and you will get a visual image to preview the site to see if it is live or not.
9. Other online tools to determine invalid links
Brokenlinkcheck
W3 Link Checker
However you want to do the checking and fixing the broken links on your site, it is important to know that to do so will always be a tedious but rewarding process. You cannot expect to accomplish the task overnight but it helps you improve your site’s ranking and avoid invalid links from penalizing your site in terms of SEO.