How to check for broken links with a broken link checker you can do easily because you don’t need to have technical knowledge to do it.
Well, before you understand how to check broken links and fix it, let’s first find out about what a broken link is.
What is Broken Link
Broken links are web pages that cannot be accessed or their content cannot appear in your browser.
A sign if there is a broken link is the appearance of text on the screen indicating that the page you are looking for does not exist, such as:
- 404 Page Not Found – the page or resource could not be found on the server.
- 400 Bad Request – the host server did not find the requested page.
- Bad Code – Invalid https response code, meaning that the server response violates the https specification
- Bad host / Invalid host name – the server name doesn’t exist or can’t connect to the server.
- Bad URL – There are errors in the URL such as missing parentheses, excessive slashes, incorrect protocol, etc.
- Timeout – https requests will timeout continuously while the link check is running
- Empty – the host server returns an empty response with no content and no response code.
- Reset – the host server failed the connection. This happens because there is a misconfiguration or the server is too busy.
- The Reason Why There Are Broken Links
- Broken links occur for a variety of reasons. If you know the reason why the broken link notification or message appears, then it will be easier to deal with it later.
There is a broken HTML, CSS, Javascript or CMS plugin element.
There was a misspelling or typing error while writing the domain name.
Your site’s URL structure or permalinks are replaced without direct links, resulting in a 404 error .
Content links like PDFs, Google Docs, videos, etc. Moved without redirect or deleted.
The external site is no longer available or moved permanently without a redirect link.
There are restrictions on website access by geolocation or firewall.
Well, from these many possibilities, you can guess what the next thing to do as a website owner is.
Risks Caused by Broken Link
Leaving error pages for a long time turns out to have some bad effects, especially on overall website performance.
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What Is SEO & How Important Is It For Websites?
The following are the risks that can happen to you if the broken link is not immediately corrected:
- Lowering the health or quality of your website.
- Threatening the reputation of your website and brand.
- Broken pages cannot be crawled by the SERPs.
- Lost revenue.
- Reduce website traffic significantly.
- Gives a bad impression that makes visitors reluctant to your website.
- Of course, what we mentioned above are the things you want to avoid, right?
Therefore, let’s find out how to detect or check broken links on your website in ways that are easy to follow.
How to Check Broken Links
How to check for broken links with the broken link checker feature and tool won’t take much time, really.
Well, so there is no reason to let your website have a lot of inaccessible pages.
Next, we will explain how to use the broken link feature from several tools and also recommend a broken link checker website.
- SEOptimer
SEOptimer is an SEO tool for reporting website audit results. Well, through an SEO audit tool, you can detect many things related to site health or the health of your site.
In addition, you can see which pages have broken links.
- Google Search Console
Google Search Console has a feature called crawl errors that can detect which pages Google cannot crawl.
The trick is to go to Settings > OPEN REPORT > Not Found (404) .
From there, you’ll see a list of what pages are crashing.
- installing Plugin Broken Link Checker
WordPress also has tons of broken link checker plugins that you can install and activate to monitor websites.
The following is a short list of some WordPress plugins to scan for broken links.
- WP Link Status Pro
- Quality Control
- Netpeak Spider
- Video Link Checker
- Broken Link Checker by Formget
- Link Checker
- These plugins have many features. Not only detects broken links but can also detect missing alt text, can be configured easily and others.
- Screaming Frog
Screaming frog is a piece of software that you can install and use to detect dead pages or links.
To use it is also easy, namely by copying and pasting the website you want to scan.
After that, click Response Code > Client Error (4xx) > Inlinks , done. You can see a list of links that are no longer working.
- Broken Link Checker
broken link checker
Online broken link checker is a website that you can use to check whether a website or blog has a broken link.
To use it, you just need to copy and paste the URL of the website you want to check.
Conclusion
Broken links are sometimes still ignored by some people.
Although sometimes the negative impact given is not so significant, leaving it for a long time and piling up broken link pages will have a fairly burdensome effect on the performance of your website.
For that, don’t forget to do regular audits and check for broken links by scanning them through the Google search console, broken link checker website and activating the plugin.
Well, talking about SEO and website performance , checking for broken links is not the only way.
At least you must have a website that is supported by hosting with 99.99% uptime like cheap hosting from Qwords.
