Broken links are a real pain. Not only are they frustrating for readers when they are navigating your blog, they damage your Google Pagerank. When the Google bots scan your site and find broken links, they log each one, as you can see in this picture below:
If you don't know how to find your crawl errors, read my Links In Tutorial I wrote earlier. You will have to complete up to step #3 to find the screen where you will see the "Crawl Errors" for your blog.
So what can you do about this? One of the main things you can do is to scan your blog regularly for broken links with a free tool like Broken Link Checker. Once you go to their home page, you can type in your blog address and click on "Find Broken Links". Be prepared to wait awhile while it scans all the pages of your blog, the more pages, the longer the wait.
Once your list of broken links comes up, you can click on "url" beside each broken link listed so
you can view the page where the broken link was found.
First you should click on "src" beside the link where a page will come up with a bunch of code. You don't need to worry about all of the code, just the highlighted piece of code. You will see the matching url link like the one in the above picture located in the src code like in the picture below. If you read the entire highlighted piece, you will find exactly where the broken link is located.
Usually the broken link is in one post which makes it a lot easier to fix but in this example I have a labels broken link so when I bring up the link, I get the entire label search results. Thankfully in the highlighted piece of code above I can narrow the broken link down. Most often blog comments are the broken links. The only way to fix comments that are broken are to delete them unfortunately. Try clicking on the persons profile to confirm that in fact their profile can't be found and if so, even if you really love their comments, you should delete it. Why? The reason again comes back to the fact that these broken profile links damage your GPR. If the broken links are fixable on your own blog, and they should be, after you locate the link that's causing the problem edit the post, fix the link then publish the post again.
Repeat this for each broken link. It's very time consuming the first time you do this; this is the reason I recommend checking for broken links regularly so it's a less daunting task.
10 comments:
Thank you! I am really enjoying this series. I had no clue that broken links could have an influence upon SEO/GPR. I took a look and a I have a terrifying number of broken links! Time to get to work!
Thank you for the appreciation; I'm so glad you are enjoying the series. :) These are things I've learned along my travels.
Unfortunately Google bots send back errors when they find these broken links, hence the "Crawl Errors", and because it's a computer, not a human, it deems your site as less trustworthy. When you think about it, Google does not want their search results coming up showing errors so they remove those from their system. The more errors you have, the less trustworthy your site is with Google.
So if you can, you should be checking for these broken links and fixing them on a regular basis to maximize your search engine results with Google.
Thanks for sharing this info. Very informative and useful especially for a not so techie person like me.
Thank you so much! This is very very helpful! I have an alarming number of broken links too! I am now wondering how the heck I got a GPR of 3!! Sheesh!
Can you tell me what the Restricted by Robots.txt is?? I have a lot there as well, are those also broken links? Most of them when I click on them seem to be the tags I used to tag the post....
Well GPR isn't solely based on this but every step to better your blog helps. Those are definitely label/tag crawl errors and they always send back a tonne. You will want to insert a nofollow code on your labels on your template....I just posted a tutorial on this today at http://www.thislilpiglet.net/2011/07/how-to-relnofollow-labels-in-blogger.html
Glad to help! :)
Thank you so much for this post (and many others). You write so well! And you explain things in a very user friendly manner too ;)
I've put my site in the checker, but it said the service wasn't working. I'll have to go back and check again.
DUDE! I just did it and apparently I have none - I find that hard to believe....I think I should try again later!
Thank you for saying that. :) I try to write so anyone understands, especially the newbies. Keep in mind that after you check and fix the broken links the first time, if you check immediately after the checker may come up with a bunch more. This is kind of a glitch. Wait a day or two, or until Google bots does it's next crawl, to check for broken links again and it should be fine. :)
Must've been commenting the same time as you. LOL! That's awesome! The first time I checked, I only had 9 and I was blogging for just about a year so it's possible. Try again later and see and if so, that's so good for you!
Thank you so much for these! I've already applied many. I've checked broken links before, but didn't understand how to fix them, so this is a life saver! I don't have time to do it now, lol, but I definitely will, probably Monday. Thank you SOOO much for this! :-D
Post a Comment