In my ongoing quest for perfection, one of the tasks that I perform on a regular basis is to check my site for Broken Links. Nothing hurts user experience (UX) like having an Error 404 Page Not Found message.
And you don’t need a WordPress plugin to run this baby. Just enter your website URL and the security code, and let it do its thing.
I use Broken Link Check weekly, to check for internal broken links. It’s one of the best free SEO tools that I use.
Some say Broken Links hurt your SEO, and some say that broken links don’t hurt your SEO. These are just ideas written by so-called SEO gurus who sometimes have absolutely NO idea what they are talking about. Because it either hurts your SEO or it doesn’t. Or maybe just a few won’t matter, but for sure, the more you have, the harder it will be for Google to crawl and understand your site and I am all about giving a good User Experience.
Reason for 404 Errors
404 errors can appear for a couple of reasons. Those which occur internally – these you can control – and those which occur externally.
Internal:
- You deleted a page without setting up a redirect.
External:
- A user typed in the wrong URL
- Someone gave you a backlink and made an error in the URL.
Whether having a bunch of broken links hurts your SEO or not, it makes your site look bad.
You can easily fix the internal ones by setting up a 301 redirect. Yeah, even on Weebly, you can do it, so if I can do it, so can you on your much more advanced WordPress site!
And for any broken outgoing links, go in and fix the link.
This Free Online Broken Link Checker also pulls up errors such as TimeOut. This is when the page to an outgoing link is slow to load. Sometimes, when running the check again, the error will disappear, but if it repeatedly shows up, I check the page out and often delete the offending link.