“How to Check Your Blog/Website for Broken Links” by Joan Y. Edwards

Check Your Links. Do They Work?

During the last year, I discovered that my site had many broken links.  Maybe a thousand or more. I worked diligently to correct them. If you find a link that doesn’t work, please let me know.

The links worked when I first entered them into my blog posts. What happens to cause the links to show error messages?  People change their websites around, delete them entirely, change the name of their website, and even delete the post.

My website now has  400 blog posts, 3297 pages, 33 documents, 627 links to images, and 5554 external (outgoing) links.

I found 2 websites that helped me find my broken links. One checked the first 3,000 webpages. The other checked the first 2,000 links.

The free websites didn’t get all of my 3,297 pages or the 5,000 links with their free versions.

One of them, Broken Link Check gave me a one-time inexpensive  price to check my entire website. They also check up to 3,000 webpages for free. I had 3,297 webpages.
Broken Link Check.com https://www.BrokenLinkcheck.com
support@brokenlinkcheck.com

Another website, DeadLinkChecker https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/ will check the whole website or one single page. They check 2,000 links for free.
Auto-check subscription service – options
Deadlinkchecker
https://www.deadlinkchecker.com/ 

Why are broken links bad?

• They negatively impact usability – resulting in reduced traffic and conversions.
• They damage your rankings – by preventing search engine website crawlers from indexing pages.

So you want to delete or correct the bad links to help your readers find the resource you gave them. Fixing the broken links will help keep people reading your blogs.

One thing that amazed me when I started checking the links on my website was that the software searches the blog content, images, and the comment areas for broken links.

The information they send you gives you broken links in many areas:

pages – like on my website – Contact, Flip Flap Floodle, Pub Sub, etc.
webpages for blog posts
tags-listed for blog posts
comments for blog posts

Main Code to worry about is 404 Not Found unavailable

Don’t be concerned about the following codes:

503 Server is temporarily unable to handle the request. I’ve discovered that links to books on Amazon often have this code. However, when I click on them, they work.