How to Remove Broken Links From Your Website

Broken links are links on your website that point to pages that no longer exist. For instance, suppose you write a post linking to an article you found very interesting on another website. A couple of months down the road that website owner decided to delete the article, or to shut the website down completely. Your link will now be pointing to something that no longer exists, so it will be considered a broken link.

Why should you care about broken links?

First because it creates a bad experience for your visitors, as it’s pretty frustrating to click on a link expecting to find something there and get a 404 error.

Second, Google knows broken links are a bad experience for users, so it doesn’t like websites that contain too many broken links (i.e., it might reduce the search rankings of a page or website that has too many).

Now that you are convinced, here’s how to remove broken links from your website. Visit BrokenLinkCheck.com, put the URL of your website, and click on “Find broken links”. Depending on the size of your site you might need to wait some minutes.

If you want a more hardcore tool check out Xenu Link Sleuth (you’ll need to download and install this one though, so the above one is much easier to use).

Once the results are displayed go through each URL and remove the dead link. I suggest that whenever you delete a link you keep the anchor text there and add a “(Update: link no longer active)” message aside to it to let users know what happened there.

Repeat this process once a year or so to make sure your website will stay clean of broken links. Your visitors will thank you, and Google will reward you.

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