Being a serious blogger or webmaster, you should check your blog or website for broken links and 404 errors on a regular basis. Why is it so crucial? Imaging that if your visitors click on a referring link from an external website and land on 404 error page of your site, they will most likely leave the site in favor of another one. Other than that, broken links and bad redirect will stop Googlebot from crawling the inner pages of your site. It will negatively affect your search engine rankings so it’s very important to be proactive in checking and removing any broken links you found. One of the best ways to find these broken links and get them fixed is using Google Webmaster Tools. If you have signed up for Google Webmaster Tools and have set it up and verified your site, here are 2 simple tutorials for you to check and remove broken links or invalid URL.

How to Check Broken Links that are Indexed by Google Search Engine

1. Log in to your Google Webmaster Tools
2. Click on Diagnostics from the left menu and select Crawl errors
3. Click on Not Found tab
4. If available, click to view which page contains the broken link

How to Remove Broken Links from Google Search Results

1. Click on Site configuration and select Crawl access
2. Click on Remove URL tab
3. Click on New removal request button
4. Enter the URL that you’d like to remove, then click Continue button
5. Select Reason, check the box and then click Submit Request button

The URL should now appear in the list and pending to be removed. It may take few days for Google to remove it.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is another tool can be considered to perform the same job.
For WordPress blogs, you can install a plugin called Broken Links Checker to deal with those broken links.

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How to Check Broken Links and Dead Links in Website or WordPress Blog Using Broken Link Checker Plugin 10 Tips: How to Better Use Google Webmaster Tools WordPress Tips: How to Deal with Broken Links 4 Ways to Check If Google Has Penalized / Banned Your Website 12 Internal Link & Broken Link Checkers, Online Tools & WordPress Plugins 9 Best Tools to Check and Highlight DoFollow / Nofollow Links How to Create a XML Sitemap for Google Search Engine 8 Ways Google Webmaster Tools Can Improve Your SEO Strategy

Author: Quertime Team

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