Dealing With Broken Links

Its very important to ensure that all the pages you have linked in your site are reachable. But its impossible to manually crawl each page and check the status of the links and update accordingly.

Broken links are the most irritating and annoying in any blog posts both for the readers as well as for the search engine. This will ultimately reduce the reputation of a blog as well as poor user experience and loss of search engine favor.

What to do for broken links until they are fixed?

You can choose two different actions you prefer when a user clicks or search engine that follows a broken link – 1. Redirect to your homepage or 2. Remove the link that are broken.

Redirect to Home Page

If you wish the users or search engines to be redirected to home page when they access a broken link.

As you probably know, incoming links play important role in ranking well in Google and other search engines. Therefore you should assure that every incoming link leads to one of pages on your blog. This may be a challenge, because World Wide Web is dynamic and changes every day:

• You can remove some posts or pages on your blog;
• You can change URL scheme on whole blog;
• Incoming links may became broken (e.g. due to some automatic text formatting);
• Someone may simply put wrong (broken) link somewhere.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t care for broken links

You might assume that companies owning search engines themselves would get the issue of broken links on their own sites. They don’t. There are plenty links to fix here. Google is really awful, many URLs do neither return a 404 nor a 301 to the new version. Yahoo and Microsoft sites like MSN tend to offer proper 404 pages bu does not bother to redirect to newer URLs. So in case you care about longevity you better just link to the blog posts that announce a new service by Google as these tend to stay online longer.

With Internet users becoming more and more sophisticated as time goes by, it will take website owners more effort to entice these users to visit their websites and broken hyperlinks will not help this very difficult process in any way.

Website owners and webmasters should be very aware of the bad effects of having broken links in their websites. They should diligently weed out and fix any broken links. Fortunately, there are now a growing number of handy utilities that can help webmasters located broken links. With these utilities, managing a website becomes relatively easier.

For example, xml-sitemaps.com has programmed a standalone script that will not only create sitemaps but also looks for broken links in a website and then informs webmasters or website owners what links they are and to which pages the links are associated with. This automation of the task of checking broken links is a great time saver for webmasters and website owners.