Fixing broken links on your site is very important. It can badly hurt your on-page seo and Google rankings. These aren’t the bad links that might be pointing towards your website. In fact, these are the links that lead to URLs, returning 404, 410 and other errors that lead to poor user-experience.
So, it is crucial for you to analyze your site for any such links and fix them ASAP. This can potentially hinder your visitors to access the information they might be searching on your website. It can result in traffic drop-down and poor revenue.
Luckily, it is quite easy to find such links and fix them. You don’t need to manually go through every link, page by page. Instead, you have to use two application: Integrity for MAC and Xenu Link Sleuth for PC.
In this guide, we’ll go through the interface of both the applications and see how easily we can do the whole process.
Fixing Broken Links using Xenu Link Sleuth
Xenu is a free application for Windows. It allows you to scan the entire website for all broken links. It takes a few minutes and returns a full report of broken links which is 100% accurate.
Many seos have been using this great tool since long for digging broken links and reaching them via email to perform broken link building.
You can download it absolutely free HERE. Once installed on computer, enter your website’s URL into the New Project Form. Also select a level of depth your processor is comfortable with and finally run the scanner.
If you own a website hosted on WordPress and you are logged in, make sure that you inform Xenu to ignore cookies. Else, it may end up finding your WordPress login page and also scan the entire administrative dashboard. This also scans up delete links.
In the advanced section, just make sure that the “Allow Cookies” is not checked.
Once the scan process has started, Xenu will go through your website and scan every link it finds. This also includes all the external links pointing to other domains. After a few minutes, it will give you a detailed report on every link on the website along with their status, whether they are alive or dead.
Always double check the links to make sure they are not broken. Xenu sometimes marks URLs that time out as broken due to some connectivity issues. It won’t take long.
Using Integrity to Find Broken Links
For MAC users, use Integrity, which is also a free application. It lets you scan the website for all broken links and is quite similar to XENU. However, a few MAC users say it isn’t that reliable, especially for larger websites that have thousands of pages and links.
Likewise XENU, Integrity is also simple to operate. Download it from their official website for free. Once installed, enter website’s root domain in the URL bar, set the timeout (go for 30 seconds) and then choose the right amount of threads.
However, if your Internet connection is not fast it will take a lot of processing power but you can increase the thread count for a quick scan.
One drawback here is that when you use extra threads, it results in more timeouts, especially when the connection is slow or the website’s host is on a lazy server.
Once you have the report on broken links, the easiest way is to check real broken links is to open them “By Status” tab. This will instantly sort them out automatically and give you a report on those links returning 404 errors.
Integrity usually displays all the occurrences of your broken links. This makes it easier for you to find the exact page and update those bad links.
Another way is to use a 301 redirect to fix all those bad links. This saves a lot of time as compared to doing it manually.
Just in case your website has broken links and you can’t figure out on how to get rid of them, contact us today and allows us to do this hectic task for you.