Broken Links Testing: Free Tools To Help You
• Make Sure Your Visitors & Search Engine Spiders Don’t Reach Dead Ends •
• How To Easily Find Broken Links Using Free Online Tools •
As far as doing everything you can to give yourself the edge when it comes to your search engine rankings and keeping your site as visitor friendly as possible, I highly recommend you occasionally perform a broken links testing on your website and/or blog.
The search engines don’t like finding broken links as they crawl through your site. In a worse case scenario, you could possibly be penalized in your ranking status if the spiders find a lot of them!
Note: I have been unable to find specific information from Google, Yahoo or MSN on how many broken links would cause a penalty to be imposed or what the actual penalty would be.
Broken links can be ones that connect pages within your site or links that you have that are pointing to other sites. In the case of other sites, the usual culprit for a broken link is that the web page, or maybe even the entire website is no longer available.
Typographical Errors Cause Broken Links, Too
In addition, a simple typing error in a page name or file name can cause a broken link. I admit … I am sometimes guilty of this. Typing out a URL while hand coding my web page is normally the reason. As you know, just one itty-bitty letter or character error and bingo! “Page Not Found” will be the result.
Making a typographical error in a link can cause a major section of your site to be suddenly disconnected or “orphaned” from the rest of your site. This can cause a page or entire section of your site to be dropped by the search engines. Though this is a worst-case situation, it can happen if you’ve not done a good job of cross-linking your entire website.
Normally, web pages should be linked to more than just one other page on your site. But, orphaned pages are not necessarily that uncommon as websites grow with more and more pages of content and many categories and sub-categories, so it is important that I mention this situation.
Tip: Always make sure to test out all the hyperlinks you’ve placed on a webpage after you’ve uploaded it. The extra minute it will take to check to see that all links are active is good web maintenance practice and keeps your site looking and acting professional!
If you don’t make a lot of page or file name changes to your site (I don’t suggest you get into the habit of doing this), or delete a lot of pages, then you might only need to run a broken link check every three months or so (there isn’t really a rule of thumb on this). However, if you have a ton of links pointing to other sites and /or you do a lot of changes to page names in your own site (again, NOT a practice you should get in the habit of!), then I’d probably choose to do a broken links testing every month.
Safe & Reliable Broken Links Testing Freebies
Keeping your site’s “link health” in tip-top shape doesn’t take long at all, and the benefit is that not only are you putting your best foot forward to your visitors – no error messages nor landing on non-existent sites – but you are doing all you can to help keep the search engine spiders happy. You are providing them with a smooth, unbroken trail to crawl through your site!
Here are two free online link checkers that will help you to find broken links – try out both and see which one you like best:
