A broken link can be really annoying, both for you as a webmaster and for the visitor looking for information. But, how can I find links not working in my WordPress blog in an easy way?
A while back I even experienced an error in an affiliate link. After a couple of days with lots of visitors to the site I paid the site a visit, only to notice that the affiliate link did not work. Catastrophe! Enough of that, so I had to look for a way to automatically find broken links, which is not links working, in my blog. Here comes a great solution.
Automatically discover broken links in your blog
There is a plugin for WordPress named Broken Link Checker. It is just perfect and very easy to use. After downloading it and installing it manually in your WordPress installation, or just by searching for the plugin inside your WordPress admin tool you should activate it and it is already working. As you head back to your Dashboard you should find a “window” with information given by the plugin with updated information about broken links on your page. By standard the plugin checks your entire webpage every 72nd hour and when it finds a broken link you will be notified in an email.
When a broken link is found you can easily change the link, remove the link or override the error and say that the link is working.
Why it is important to remove broken links
A broken link will tell your visitors a lot about you. If someone read an article and find 1-2 links not working they will consider your content crap and look somewhere else instead. Google does not like links with errors either, so you better go ahead and remove all broken links from your blog or website right away.
Removing broken links will also help bring traffic to the sites you are linking to, both internal and external, and as long as the links are do-follow links they will also help the Page Rank of the pages you link to.
