How to Fix Broken Links

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.