Normally a blog or a tech website contains a lot of links to external websites because we embed the download links of useful third party software or online services to the posts. As time goes by, it is normal to find hundreds or thousands of links broken due to some of the reasons such as the owner of the website moved to a new domain name, changed permalinks, or the owner simply decided to pull the plug. When a person accesses a broken link, they would either get a 404 Not Found, Server Not Found or a shows a page that has nothing to do what the article says. The 404 not found error would mean that the website is still accessible but the page that you’re trying to access is not available. What you can do is try to access the root of the domain and try searching for the new updated link. As for the server not found error, it means that you cannot even access the website at all probably due to temporary outage or the website is no longer available.
If you have a website, you may want to consider making sure that the internal and external links on your website are not broken or least don’t contain hundreds of them. Logically a website that contains a lot of broken links would only meant that the website is low in quality and not properly maintained. Although Google has never admitted penalizing websites with many broken links, but I have personally experienced this twice when I upgraded from PunBB to vBulletin and removing the translation plugin in forum which caused hundreds/thousands of broken links. The traffic dropped drastically in just a couple of days and could take months/years to recover if you’re lucky.
One way to check for dead links in WordPress is to use a plugin called Broken Link Checker. By using this plugin, the checking of links are done automatically at server side which is way better and faster than running a software such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth on your computer that requires to crawl your website first to get the links.
Broken Link Checker is very powerful yet it is easy to use. After installing and activating the plugin, it will start to detect all links from your posts and pages, then proceed in checking the links. The configuration options are pretty straight forward. You get to set how often you want to recheck the links, sending email notifications when detected broken links, where to look for broken links, what kind of links to check, amount of time to check before flagging it is broken, server load limit and even the ability to check FileServe, MediaFire, YouTube and RapidShare links.
Once finished scanning, go to Tools > Broken Links to view all the posts/pages that contains the broken links. The Broken Links page shows the URL that is broken, status, link text and the source. As you can see from the screenshot below, this blog contains 503 broken links and 1150 redirects out of 8649 links.
I can easily edit the URL, unlink or set it as not broken by moving the mouse cursor to the broken URL. I can even perform bulk actions by selecting multiple checkboxes and then select the actions from the drop down menu.
So far I’ve cleaned up most of the broken links on the blog and will start verifying the redirects. Actually the redirects are harmless but there are some that redirects the link to a page that has nothing to do with the original link. So it is best to use the unlink option for such situation. Next is to find a solution to check for broken links in vBulletin which can be quite a challenge because there are over 200,000 posts in the forum!
Download Broken Link Checker for WordPress
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