SEO Lion’s Personal Blog

Broken links in a site - Are they good?

How do you personally feel when you end up on a page which says ‘Page Not Found’ in a site you were browsing? Do you like that? There is no reason for you to like that - I’m sure..

So will you purposely keep any link in your site which can end up in ‘Page not found? You shouldn’t..

Google crawler is a simulation of a human being browsing through a site and grasping contents in it. When it find good things, it stores into its memory and pours it out when another person requests for it.

So the same way you hate a site for having broken links in it, Google also must hate them. Do you want Google to hate your site and never want to visit your site? The answer should be no, if you are really concerned with the SEO performance of your site.

How to eliminate broken links in a site?

Broken links can be present in a site due to a simple human error. One way to find them is by checking the links manually. But it becomes tedious when you are checking a medium to heavy website having a good number of pages.

I am using a tool called ‘Xenu’s Link Sleuth’. It’s basically a crawler, which will open up page after page in site and open all the links in it, whether its outbound or within same site. It finally gives you a comprehensive report about the broken links, redirected URL’s and a sitemap of the website.

So will you make sure that your site is free from broken links from now?Â