We’re going on a link hunt, we’re going to catch a big one!
Today’s the day to check everything that might be turning readers away from your blog, but don’t be overwhelmed – it’s not as onerous as it sounds.
Over time, you’re bound to have some broken links. The sites you link to shut down, change their link structure, move their URLs… anything can happen. It can be bad for readability, but also for SEO.
In this episode I will explain how best to find the links that are broken, whether you are a beginner or have an established blog. Small steps in this instance will help you tackle what might be a huge task (but worth it in the end!). I also go through what to do when you find the broken link, and what you can do while you’re there on an old post
I also go through a few tools that will help you on your expedition. Check the show notes for links to each, and happy hunting!
Click here to listen to day 27 of the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series on the ProBlogger Podcast.
Further Reading:
- One Activity You Should Do On Your Blog Every Day
- 3 Important Questions To Ask About Posts in Your Blog Archives
- Updating Old Posts On Your Blog
- 7 Old Post Revival Techniques You Won’t Believe You’re Overlooking
- 25 Reasons Why Google Hates Your Blog
- How to Find and Fix Broken WordPress Links: Elegant Themes
- Website Weight Loss: Fix Your Broken Links: About Tech
- Website Broken Links: Why You Should Fix Them: Dave Lucas
We created some good post and few among them have issue – and in GWT it shows a 404 error adding a extra random characters to the url.
Why this occurs, asked in Moz – they said due to theme or plugins. But i am not using any plugins to hangle the url.
Thank you for this top tip. I had no idea broken links impacted SEO. Good call!
I use the broken link checker WordPress plugin and it is lot more helpful to hunt for all bad links in my blog. I follow this as a periodic activity and helps to keep the link structure clean always. I simply use my archive to collect all the blog posts published along with a search widget. Thanks for the wonderful podcast.
Hi Darren,
Excellent reminder. It’s been a while since I’ve been on a link hunt and goodness know some of the links on my blog are broken. I don’t link out as much but needed to do a complete overhaul after I pulled my eBooks from one online store so they’d be exclusive to Amazon Kindle.
Thanks for sharing :)
Ryan
Well, I really take care of these small things impacting SEO of a blog, specially these broken links. I usually check my blog for Broken links, normally 2 times a week including all other On-page aspects which can help me rank better in Search Engine.
That’s awesome, I totally missed looking at the broken links for my clients but now I’m on it.
Cheers,
Sukh
Thank you for your article. After reading this, we checked all our links if some are still okay, and we found soem dead links too.