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Quick Update:
Don’t be too zealous in cleaning up reported broken backlinks. I’ve found that if a server is having a connection issue at the time you log into your admin panel there will be good links reported as broken. Why? Because at that “moment” they are broken, but not permanently. Don’t just delete all broken backlinks when they are reported. Give it some time, if they show up repeatedly then break the link, but don’t be too hasty.
I decided to take this plugin for a spin. I didn’t realize how many broken links I had on the site. Guess where the most of them were?
In The Comments
There are a lot of RE Bloggers out there that have left comments here at the Lab. I was surprised to find out how many of you have changed blog URL’s and how many of your comment links went to pages that no longer exist. That could be for several reasons:
- You deleted the post
- You moved your entire blog to a new URL
- You changed the permalink structure on your site with no 301 redirects in your .htaccess file
Those are the more common reasons I can think of.
Broken Link Checker will find those broken links and report on the dashboard how many you have. A quick click and you can see them and decide what to do. I chose to leave the text in place and remove the link. This way the reference is still there if someone wants to search for the content at whatever new address it now resides.
Cleaning up Old Sites
After the recent malware infestation of WP blogs in GoDaddy I cleaned up a bunch of our old listing sites. There were links on some posts to features or photo sets on some of those. I removed those links as well.
I”m not sure the impact on your site when you have a lot of broken links. Especially if they are in the comments. But it is a good idea to have a tidy blog without a bunch of broken links.
If you want to try it, go to the Plugins Page “Add New” and type in “Broken Link Checker”
I was amazed by this plugin! I had over 40 broken links and haven’t even been blogging all that long! It’s pretty surprising how many people move pages altogether or just remove them from their sites when they seem outdated- it’s a bummer to lose some of that great content!
.-= Sasha Farmer´s last blog ..Charlottesville 365; Hiking in Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville =-.
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Thanks for the post, Dave. I have a relatively new blog and I hadn’t thought of running this plugin and I was SHOCKED at how many broken links I had, d**n comments. Anyway, useful information.
what is the effect of broken links on your SEO? how big is its impact?
Roch,
I don’t think it has any effect on SEO but it has an effect on your Audience. It’s not good housekeeping to be sending them to a bunch of broken links on your site. It is like inviting people into your home when it isn’t picked up and clean.
More than SEO we should be concerned about reader experience and our audience.
Dave
I am sure there will always be a number of people that drop their domains at some point. We can’t be held responsible for cleaning that up.
Gwen,
Ah, but you are held responsible and accountable for broken links on Your site. And Google does weigh that in PageRank. It is after all a link on your site. I know it doesn’t seem fair. But that is how the world works and a lot of broken links can take down your page rank. So I would recommend you check and keep it clean. One or two isn’t going to have an affect. But if you have hundreds of broken links it can. When I first installed this plugin it found over 250 broken links almost all of them in comments.
Dave