How to find broken links in your website

If you have a website or a blog which has too many posts or links or images then it's hard to find broken links and also to maintain each of the broken links. The reason for broken link might be different like a link in one post pointing to another post which is deleted, if there is a change or update that was done in the outbound link, if the outbound link doesn't exist anymore, an upgrade to software or plugin might also rarely cause images or links to be misplaced to different folders in hosting server, database change or upgrade etc, deleting a comment which was already live for sometime and if there was a link pointing to this comment etc.

Also check: How to fetch your Website as Google

If you are using Wordpress for your website or blog then there is a good news for you. Even if you are not using Wordpress, you can still find broken links using Google Webmasters tool. I usually check my webmasters account almost everyday to check if there are any issues, or broken links or not followed links or not found or some server errors or any crawl errors - so that I can correct and then submit it to Google for re-indexing.

Also check: How to handle reappearing of fixed crawl errors

If you have removed a post or a page from your blog or website which is already indexed by Google, then it's always better to remove that webpage from Google search results. Check my previous post on How to remove URL from Search Engine results. If you have written a new article or is a related article to the one that was deleted, then you can point the deleted post URL to the new or any existing  post. Check my previous post on some of the Important points to follow while redirecting webpages.

For Wordpress users there is a plugin users, there is a plugin named "Broken Link Checker". Download, install and activate this plugin. Once activated, it will check for posts, comments, blogroll, pages, custom field, missing images and other content for broken links and notify you via Wordpress dashboard or Email. In addition to this it will identify links that no more work, any redirects, can make broken link display differently in posts that are live (which you need to set and is an optional settings), prevents search engines from following broken links (useful when you are applying for Adsense), searching by URL and anchor text is now made easy using this plugin. And the best thing is you can edit links directly from home page without updating each post.

Also check: Why is it better to create multiple views for Website Analytics

Note that it's always better to keep a backup of your entire website before going for a major upgrade of your website or blog as the change might sometimes cause errors or issues with the existing links. Using this backup, you can always revert back to original status.

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