So many factors influence the amount of traffic your blog gets. Well-lit and edited photos help visitors see what you’re blogging about. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps bring in visitors from the search engines. Active social media profiles allow your followers to get a direct link to your newest blog post. But all of these factors can be diminished if there are broken links on your blog that result in a 404 error, misdirected link or “dead link.” There are two distinct reasons to fix broken blog links. 1. Give visitors to your blog a positive continuous experience on your site. 2. Tell Google that your blog is credible and reliable.
How to Find Broken Blog Links
Google Analytics Dashboard
Your blog’s Google Analytics Dashboard holds a wealth of information about visitors. It can tell how visitors find your blog, how long they stay there, where they go next, as well as their demographics.
The dashboard can also indicate which links on your blog direct users to a 404 error page. Google’s blog explains how to set up a custom alert when 404 errors increase for visitors to your blog.
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Fix Broken Blog Links
Broken Link Plugins
Several free WordPress plugins allow you to scrub your blog for broken blog links and suggest ways to fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that can find and redirect broken blog links. “Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll) and other content and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take from a few minutes up to an hour or more. ”
WP Broken Link Status Check crawls a WordPress blog for broken links, as well. It takes several factors. “Knowing that these crawling processes can hurt your server performance, we have tried to put the focus on performance impacts, without performing massive data queries or updates, and not prioritizing crawler activity ahead of real visits.”
Link Checker is a WordPress plugin that “uses an external service to crawl your website and find broken links and images on your website.” This plugin also looks for broken YouTube links. It will search your blog daily for broken links if you’d like.
Broken Link Sites
Adding additional plugins can also limit the way your WordPress blog’s function, so you may choose a site that searches your blog without the need to download anything.
BrokenLinkCheck.com : “This free website validation tool reports only hyperlinks that are really broken – unlike other popular tools which list both good and bad weblinks all mixed together making it very hard to comprehend and work with such “noisy” information.”
Comment below: What has caused 404 errors on your blog? What’s the simplest way to find and fix broken blog links for you?
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