At least that is what all that email spam we are receiving is trying to tell us, right? As a web master, maintaining large websites can mean big headaches when it comes to broken links. Web pages get renamed, moved or deleted so it is important that the website’s web master or web developer makes sure that all the links are updated and there are no broken hyper links that lead to dead ends. It is important for your visitors, but also for your SEO efforts.

In a previous article, Good Web Design Practices – Handling Errors, we talked about how to handle broken links when visitors stumble upon one of them. This article is about finding the broken hyper links before the visitors find them. And it’s not that hard to do it; there are a lot of tools that check web sites for broken links, so bigger websites do not necessarily need to be bigger headaches. A free and easy to use tool to find broken links is: Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth

The program checks web sites for broken hyper links and it checks not only the “normal” links but also style sheets, scripts, frames, local image maps links, etc. It supports SSL websites and detects and reports redirected URLs. You can download the program here and if you need more information there is also a F.A.Q on the page.

Here are some interesting and useful features:

• You can set, depending on your connection, the number of parallel threads before starting the search;
• You can select to exclude certain types of links from the search;
• Selecting Properties for a link from the list of broken links you can see the address of the linking page, the address of the page linked to and the actual code of the link;
• At the end it delivers a nice report which includes, besides the list of broken links, a HTML site map with pages’ titles.

Note:
If you are using Hotlink Protection for your images, you will get a broken link (403 – forbidden access) each time an image is displayed. But, if you have all your images in the same folder (i.e mydomain.com/images); a workaround for this issue is to add the web address of the images folder to the restriction list.

Broken Links and SEO

Because the links are the gateways to your web pages, most of the SEO efforts will concentrate on the links: optimize internal linking, get more “strong” incoming links, do not link to bad neighborhoods, etc. The strength of a link depends on several factors, some related to the webpage/website from which the link originates, and some related to the link itself.

The Out Links and In Links columns in the Xenu’s Link Sleuth’s broken links results table contain valuable SEO information. The number of incoming and outgoing links per page can be used not only to analyze your own pages but the web pages of your competition as well:

• Out Links – represent how many links you have on the page (images links are also included unless they are restricted by the user). Remember that the search engine bots do not usually crawl links in excess of 100 per page. The number of links also influences the strength of the link; the more links on a page, the less strength for each;

• In Links – represent how many internal links are pointing to that page, image, etc. Optimize internal linking; internal links can really drive a page but use this wisely, if every page links to every page, the “link juice” is diluted;

LinkTiger

I was doing some blog maintenance work the other day; I changed the permalinks format for the posts, and something, somehow went wrong, because I had no more “active” links. I didn’t know at that time, because the homepage of the website was working fine, but if someone would have tried to open a post or see the posts in a category, he would have seen a 404 error page (page not found). Luckily I was keeping an eye on the traffic so when I started to see the poor search engine robots getting 404s I knew that something is wrong.

This is something that I could have prevented with an “automatic” link checker, so I did some research and I found this tool: Link Tiger. It’s a free online website broken links checking service so you don’t have to install anything but the good part is that it can automatically run a broken link hunt on your website(s) and alert you via emails. Besides scheduled links checking, I also found a couple of useful features:

• It checks for broken links, not only in web pages, but also within PDFs and MS Office documents;
• Normal view and page source view with highlighted broken links for easy spotting;

The free version has some limitations (i.e. only 1 website, 1000 links maximum) but there are also paid versions of the tool with improved features. So, happy link hunting!

Everybody from time to time, surfing the web, will encounter the famous 404 error page saying that the web page or the document you were looking for was not found. The cause for the error could be a reorganization of the website (the file was removed, renamed or deleted); a user involuntarily mistyping the URL of the page or maybe the web page never existed. No matter the cause, any webmaster will want to avoid having these types of broken links on his website. Besides the 404, “File not found” error code, there are other standard HTML error codes. Here are a few examples:

• A 400 error code indicates that the link or the request could not be understood by the server due to malformed syntax;
• A 401 error code indicates that authorization is required to access the file;
• A 403 error code indicates that the visitor is forbidden to access the file (maybe it’s in a password protected folder or maybe you activated the Hotlink Protection on your images);
• A 500 error code indicates that the web server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request (there are miss configured options on the web server).

Each error code has its own standard page and error message. In order to deliver a better user experience, you might want to customize the error pages with your own messages and directions for the visitor to follow. The idea is that you still need to let the visitor know that something unexpected is going on, but provide him with options.

A good practice is to include the website’s sitemap here (so the visitor can choose a “real” page to go to) or, if you have a website search feature, include it here as well.

If you have cPanel installed on your hosting account, you can see the last 300 errors for your website, by selecting the [Error log] option. Check this log frequently to find out if you have broken links on your site, or, what files do not exist and they should. Use this information to fix the errors and to keep your site running smoothly.