camillycams.com – Broken links (links broken, dead, or inactive) are one of the causes of a decrease in the quality of blogs, especially SEO factors and have the possibility to reduce the blog’s position in search engines. Let’s review the understanding, how to check, until the solution to overcome it.
Understanding
What are broken links? Broken link is a link which when opened will lead to an inactive page (error 404). If someone is visiting your blog for the first time and encounters a 404 error page, then there is an 88% chance that they will not return [1]. Visitors will feel cheated because the link listed doesn’t exist. This greatly affects the level of trust. Certainly very detrimental, right?
How to Check Broken Links on Blogs and Overcome Them
Reason
There are several factors that cause broken links to appear, including:
- Link Writing Error
Make sure to write all links correctly, both internal links (links that point to other articles on the same blog) and external links (links that point to other blogs or sites). - Changing Domains
When changing the domain, all links on the blog will change. If you don’t set up redirects between domains then there will be broken links. - Changing the Article Permalink
It’s fine to do, but it’s a big problem when you don’t manage to redirect from the old permalink to the new permalink. Old permalinks will be considered non-existent and become broken links. Learn How to Safely Change a Permalink that Has Already Been Published. - Changing the Site Directory
This only applies to blogs or self-hosted sites like WordPress. When moving files to a new directory, all links will change too. Therefore a diversion is needed as number three above. - Blog Comments
In the comments column, you can usually insert the blog URL from the commenter or automatically retrieve it from the Google profile URL. If the blog URL or Google profile is no longer active, then it will be considered a broken link. - File Not Available
The link points to a downloaded file (PDF, video, image, etc.) that has been deleted or moved.
How to Check
This can be done manually by checking all the links one by one. Hmm… just heard it’s already lazy huh. But you can do it quickly and automatically using the help of free tools on the internet. One of the most popular sites to check is Broken Link Checker.