In this era of blogging where almost every niche is becoming
competitive you might just be too busy doing other things that can make your
blogging business boom up or to win your competitors ,not knowing that
something somewhere is affecting your blog negatively.
In this case am talking about nothing else other than broken links, yes they are very bad and can affect your blog
negatively. This broken links are some sometimes referred to as dead links or even 404 links by most people, they are all the same.
This broken links are dead links (both internal and
external) which is not redirecting to anywhere else other than the 404 error
page, this is caused due to the blogger or webmaster deleting the page that you
are linking to or changing the permalink. Did you get it or are you still
confused about what I just explained? If yes, ok let me give an example:-
I have a website where I am giving out free eBooks and you
now took to your blog to tell your readers about my website that I am sharing
free eBooks there, on the process you would try to link out to my blog
(external link), I might decide later on that am not going to be sharing free
eBooks anymore on my blog and maybe decide to delete that blog or webpage, if I
do so that your link that is pointing at that my particular webpage would be
pointing to a 404 page , why? Because the actual webpage that it was linking to
do no longer exist and the link will now be termed as a broken (dead) link. The
same thing is applicable if I decide to change the permalink. Hope you got it
right now?
Broken links is not good both in human eye and that of the
search engines, that’s why google recommended that you should regularly check
for broken links on your blog or website.
How Do I Check For
Broken Links On My Blog?
For WordPress users there is a broken link checker plugin which is very useful though I won’t
advise you to go for the plugin as it would slow down your blog so I am going
to be listing out the top 5 free tools I use to monitor my blog`s broken
(internal and external) links. Here are the tools1.
Dead link checker is a free to use online broken
link checker tool, this does not only check for internal and external broken
links, it also check for image links also.
This is another
online based link checker tool that quickly scans your blog or website links to
verify whether your hyperlinks is
working appropriately, all you are required to do is to input your blog /
website URL without https and click “GO” and the results would be shown to you
in a grand style.
3. Screaming Frog SEO spider Tool
This is a highly recommended tool for seo work, this tool crawls and analyzes all links, images , scripts and css on your blog / website and clearly displays it in a table, this tool is not an online tool, it is a software that is downloadable for windows , Mac and Ubuntu users . You can freely download the trial version with some restrictions from here and the licensed version without restrictions here
4. Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu Link Sleuth is a downloadable software for windows designed specifically to
detect broken links
on large websites, I personally prefer this tool because of its SSL support,
its ability to detect redirected URLs
and ability to recheck broken links. You can download Xenu link sleuth here.
W3C link checker is an easy to use tool for detecting of
broken links in a website.
This tool works similar like search bots, it doesn’t check
restricted links, i.e. links that you restricted search bots from crawling via
your sitemap, you would have to manually check those ones.
These are the tools that I use in monitoring my blog dead links I hope you would find them useful, kindly use the comment box to add up to the list any other dead link checking tool(s) that you have used and conclude that it is okay, and please don’t forget to share this with your friends on your social circle, thanks.
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