Broken Links are disaster for your SEO and your website promotion efforts. Make sure you check your broken link with broken link checker tools online. But before your check these hefty links which are not working anymore, you need to find all your broken links or often termed as dead links. A website analysis using the Google Webmaster Tools or any other online tool will help you discover these links, which are responsible for a bad user experience.
What are Broken Links ?
Basic definition of a broken link is, A link or a Hyperlink that is not working or leading to a page that does not exist is a broken link. It can also be called a dead or lifeless link which contains the 404 code. Broken link is really a bad part of a Blog/Website which a user would never want to experience. Broken link affects the SEO of the website very much as it leads the traffic to 404 error page and diverts the entire visitors.
It is possible that all your efforts and valuable time can decay if you are not aware of Broken Links.
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Possible Reasons for Broken Links/Dead Links
- The main reason behind the broken link is to forget to use ‘http://‘ at the very beginning of the link or URL.
- Another reason could be the unavailability of the specific webpage. May be a webpage is moved to another location or changed their website permalinks, then you can have problems with these links.
- There could be one more reason if the server stops working or the Domain name of the page changes or the webmaster of that domain decided to moved on to another domain or stopped some service which you linked on to some page on your website.
- In WordPress, broken links are also caused by changing the Tags and categories names and often occurs also with changing the permalink structure. If you want to reduce your chances of broken links with the case of permalink, then read this article to choose the best permalink structure for your blog.
How to Check the Broken Link Online
There are several broken link checker online tools which you can use to check out those links which are not working anymore. If you are using WordPress, then chances are even more simpler. Just Install the broken link checker plugin from the WordPress Repository and you are good to go.
In WordPress there are Plugins that are dedicated to check the broken and invalid links, URL’s in a Blog/Website.
Broken Link Checker (WordPress Plugin)
This plugin is the best and the most downloaded plugin in WordPress. This plugin checks all the post, pages, URL’s, comments etc. for broken and invalid links.
This are the basic and advanced options that are in the plugin. The plugin after installation automatically checks the broken links.
(Download Broken Link Checker)
Online Tools for Broken Link Checker
1. Visit Broken Link Checker to check all the broken links. Broken Link Checker is a very reliable and flexible website to tool to find out all the broken links automatically. With this tool you don’t need to manually search the broken links.
In the URL box enter the URL of the Blog/Website to check out all the broken links. It will take a bit time depending on your posts, links. ( see the below screen shot for more clear shot).
After I ran this tool on my own blog, I also found some broken links on my website also. below is the screenshot. These pages are occurred because I changed my tags and while making the relative linking, I wrote the wrong url.
2. You can also use W3C Link Checker to detect all the dead links of the Blog/Website. It will also take few minutes to crawl the entire website. The most trusted platform for all design rules developed by world wide web consortium (W3C).
With the Google Webmaster Tools all the dead links and URL can also be removed. It is very useful tool as it helps in removing all the invalid URL’s and pages that are indexed by the Google Bots.
Importance of Fixing Broken Links:
Fixing all the broken links is a very good step for the Blog/Website. By this you can improve the quality and the traffic. Without broken links the SEO would also be good and will boost at a rapid pace. Search engine ranking also increases when there are no broken links.
Therefore, there are many benefits in fixing Broken Links. So be very much ready and eager to do good for your Blog/Website.
Hope this post would benefit you in the long run. If you have any query and doubt then please don’t feel shy to comment.
