Broken links are harmful for wordpress website SEO. In wordpress tutorial, will show you, how to check broken links in wordpress. How to fix broken links. Broken links are bad and annoying, Broken links will give the bad impression to user about your wordpress website.
Why Broken links are not good for SEO.
- Check for broken links and correct HTML.
If Google is giving guidelines about broken links than, it is so important we should check broken links in wordpress and fix or remove broken links from wordpress site. Google actually penalized webpages which has broken links and it affect your search engine page rank.
How Broken links will be generated on wordpress website?
Main reason behind broken links which we found is, comments. Many commenter use fake domain names and URLs which does not exists. So while approving comment, check URL which posted by user. Another reason is wordpress themes. Many people change their wordpress themes. Some times, when theme has different custom image sizes are used in theme, Images are not found which are specified in theme. So whenever you change your wordpress theme, check images are not broken.
Some time you use reference URLs in wordpress site. If webmaster shut down their sites than reference URL will be broken. So you need to check broken URLs on regular basis.
We recommend to check broken URLs at least in one month.
how to check broken links in wordpress website
We found useful wordpress plugin for checking and fixing broken links. You need to install following wordpress plugin.
Broken Link Checker
This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found. This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.
Features
- Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
- Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
- Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
- Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (optional).
- You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.
- Links can be edited directly from the plugin’s page, without manually updating each post.
- Highly configurable.
How to Use Broken link checker plugin
After activating the plugin, go to Tools » Link Checker. plugin will work in background and find out the website has broken links. If you have the large amount of posts than it will take some time depending on your server capability.
If your site has no broken links than you will see following screenshot.
If you site has broken links then you will see following result. In this screen shot we shown you how to fix broken links. There are some options can be found for each list item. Following are options.
- Edit link
- Unlink
- Not Broken
- Dismiss
You can choose option which you want. From list page you can edit URL and fix link. If URL not exist than you can unlink URL.
After you are fixing of all broken links. You can disable this wordpress plugin and After one month you can again process same thing. This will increase your website page ranking and users will not get bad impression about your wordpress website.