Sunday, July 15, 2012

Finding and fixing broken links


In this lesson I will teach you about broken links. A broken link is a hyperlink which does not take you to the required page when you click it. Sometimes these links produces errors in your browser.

Why do we need to fix our blogs broken links? 

One of the main reasons why we fix it is to improve our page rank and improve our SEO. If a blog or website has no broken links, chances are for an improvement in pagerank.

Locating your blogs broken links

Locating our blogs broken links could be a pain in the butt, in the old days you got to click each and every one of your links to know if they are properly working and it will take you a lot of time. But now we have tools to search and find these broken links.

http://www.iwebtool.com/ and http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com are websites that lets you find those broken links in your website.

How to fix broken links

Most broken links can be found on links to other websites, guest comments, and images links. And all you have to do is to go to any of those two link checker websites and put your blogs' URL (ex. www.yourblog.com) and you will see lists of URL's that are broken. Now you can repair them or delete them.

1. From the link URL you can see the subject of the link within the body of the link.
2. Go to the page of your blog that you think or know the broken link is from. 
3. Click on the link and see if it is broken just in case you have not identified it correctly. 
4. Then you can either delete it completely or correct it by deleting the link and replacing it by a new working link. 
5. Once you have worked your way through the broken links on your blog, enter your blog name into Broken Link Checker again and re-check. 
6. The list of broken links should now all be marked with a tick, or if you have missed a few broken links repeat the fixing process as described above.

Once all the links has been fully repaired, you will notice and improvement in your ranking.

I suggest you do broken links checking and repairing once every month or every 2 weeks. If you miss maintaining it for a long time, you will probably have a lot of repairing to do. Just like in my first blog, I never checked its link for more than one year and now it has 55 broken links.