How a Broken Link Checker Can Help You Maintain Your Website
Introduction
A broken link is a link that no longer works. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including the fact that your website has been hacked, but it’s most often caused by changes in the way that your website’s pages are structured or hosted. If you don’t take steps to fix these broken links on your site then they can cause visitors to get lost or even leave altogether.
Why Broken Links Are Problematic
Broken links are problematic because they can cause your website to lose search engine ranking, waste your time, frustrate your visitors and make your website look unprofessional.
- Google penalizes websites with broken links. The more broken links an average web page has, the lower its overall quality score will be in relation to other sites in its niche category. As a result of this ranking penalty, users are likely to avoid visiting these pages altogether and instead go directly to another site that does not suffer from this problem.
- Broken links not only affect how well a site ranks when users perform searches but also affect how quickly it loads for users performing other tasks on the same domain (e.g., browsing through images or reading product descriptions). This means that if you want people who visit your site but don’t necessarily want to buy anything from there then fixing all those 404s issues could mean quicker loading times for everyone else who visits too.
How to Find Broken Links
In order to find broken links, you can use a number of tools. One simple way is by simply checking your site regularly with a broken link checker. This will help keep track of any potential dead ends or problematic pages on your site that may be causing problems for users.
If you have multiple websites or blogs, it’s important that they are all connected so search engines can crawl them all together and index the content from each one. You should also make sure there are no duplicate URLs in these URLs as this could cause issues when trying to build an authority ranking for each blog/website individually without having any negative effects on overall rankings across platforms such as Google Search Console.
You may want to consider using GSC if possible when performing manual audits because it has the ability not only to show how many pages have been crawled but also where those pages came from before being crawled by Googlebot itself.
What to Do With Your Broken Links
Now that you know how to find broken links, there are some things to keep in mind when dealing with them.
- Explore the link. If a broken link is referring you somewhere else on your website and not taking you back to where it should be, there’s no reason to worry just follow the link until it ends up at its proper destination.
- Find the broken link’s source. Sometimes this is simple; if someone emailed me an email from Gmail and asked me about SEO tips (which was often), then I would respond by pointing them toward my own blog post about SEO tips on that same topic! However, if someone asks me about SEO tips and then doesn’t give any details about what they’re looking for beyond “I have a small business,” finding an exact match can be difficult since many businesses operate under different names and domains than those used by consumers themselves. In these cases, try searching within Google itself.
How Does a Broken Link Checker Work?
A broken link checker works by crawling your website and comparing the links on it to other websites. The more links you have, the more work a crawler needs to do in order to crawl through all of them. This can slow down link-checking.
A good crawler will also take into account any tags or categories that may have been used in order to categorize different types of content on your site. When these tags are present on another website, they can help identify which types of content should be checked for broken links when compared with yours as well as how many pages need updating/re-crawling due to missing content vs. duplicate pages due to duplicate words used across multiple articles within a single article category being identified as unique terms from one piece written about something similar but not exactly alike yet still needing updating due only because some key phrases were misspelled so now both articles share those same terms so another reader would see two different paragraphs instead just one long paragraph each time instead just two separate paragraphs altogether
You can use a broken link checker to find broken links so you can fix them.
Broken link checkers discover broken links on websites. It will tell you where the problem lies and how to fix it. The most common reason for a broken link is when the URL has been changed, or perhaps the page has been moved to another directory.
Fixing these types of issues is easy with a broken link checker, but there are other ways that these problems can occur as well; for example:
- The domain name doesn’t match what’s listed in Google’s index (for example: “www.” instead of just “HTTP://”)
- A file wasn’t uploaded properly
If one of these things happens then your website may have some issues!
Conclusion
By using a broken link checker to find broken links, you can quickly fix them and keep your site looking up-to-date. Broken links can be frustrating for visitors and hard to track down, but with these tools, it’s easy to find which pages on your site need fixing and where they are located. When done properly, they will save you time and money in the long run.
