Boost SEO and User Experience with this FREE Broken Link Checker
Posted: February 19, 2025 | Tagged: Blogging
In my ongoing quest for perfection, one of the tasks I perform regularly is to run my site for Broken Links. Nothing hurts user experience (UX) like having an Error 404 Page Not Found message.
I use Broken Link Checker on a weekly basis to check for internal broken links.
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.
Also Read: How to Disable Right Click on Images on Weebly
Also Read: How to Disable Right Click on Images on Weebly
Reason for 404 Errors
404 errors can appear for a couple of reasons. Those of which occur internally - these you can control - and those which occur externally.
Internal:
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.
And just in case, for those incomings, I set up my own 404 Page Not Found page simply by creating a page with the URL: 404.html:
Internal:
- You deleted a page and didn't set up a redirect.
- 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.
And just in case, for those incomings, I set up my own 404 Page Not Found page simply by creating a page with the URL: 404.html:
And it is totally free. There is also no daily limit and no limit on the number of URLs that they check, unlike all the other supposedly FREE ones.
