One of the most important tasks for any webmaster is ensuring that you don’t have broken links on your website. But what kind of tool should you use for that purpose? I recently found a free broken link tool that I’d like to share with you.
Broken links can cause several problems. First, they can siphon off necessary link juice that flows from one page to another. If these pages are internal to your website, then you’ll have visitor usage problems, which can hurt your reputation. If those broken links are external and point in to your website, then you’ll get less traffic to your website. Either way, you’ll lose some authority points with the search engines and with your human audience.
All of this means you must identify and fix broken links quickly or suffer at the hands of the Internet gods.
Enter The Site Map Generator and Broken Link Tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas.
This tool is more than a broken link tool, obviously. But it serves as a useful tool for helping you find your broken links. It will crawl up to 10,000 pages at once. However, if you set it to crawl that many pages, expect it to take awhile. The bright side is you can have your broken link report e-mailed to you so you don’t have to wait.
The report is pretty thorough. It includes:
- Number of internal links
- Number of external links
- A list of your internal link errors
- A list of your redirects
- A list of your external link errors
- And a list of your external redirects
After reviewing these reports, you should have enough information available to identify your link problems and get those fixed.
Test question: Which links are more important (multiple choice):
- a. Outbound links?
- b. Inbound links?
- c. Internal links?
No, it’s not a trick question. The answer is, All of the above. Sorry, that wasn’t an option. You pass by default.
All links serve a purpose. It isn’t merely navigational. Outbound links can send traffic to other websites and cause the people you want to buy your widgets to leave in mass droves. But that’s not what you want, is it? Still, carefully placed outbound links can serve a useful SEO purpose.
Inbound links, too, can benefit you in your search engine optimization goals. As well, internal links can be SEO gold.
In fact, internal links are just as important as inbound links for SEO purposes. Both are better than outbound even though outbound links can be good for SEO. Internal links with the proper anchor text can pass just as much SEO link building juice and inbound links and are easier to get. That’s why an internal navigation structure for your website is the No. 1 link building method for most SEOs. It should be for you too.
Web design, site structure and internal linking can all lead to problems that can ultimately affect your search rankings. A post on Bing’s Webmaster Center highlights the effect of poor design and what steps should be taken to ensure your web sites gains the most from your efforts.
There are times when the general theme coming from some blogs is that search engines are the enemy. In reality, if your site is providing valuable content then the search engines want it – they want to be able to tell the world about it. Rather than being the enemy, they can be a web site owners best friend. It’s simply matter of listening to what they want, how they want it presented and supplying it. As the Bing post stated:
….if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines.
It’s common sense. If the search engine bots cannot read certain pages – they won’t be indexed and if they are not indexed, they won’t appear in the search results.
Simply tasks like using Redirects when pages are moves; adding a Robots file to block out certain areas of your website that don’t need indexing; and providing clear and keyword targeted page and directory titles should be standard practice.
If you can ensure your site is easily spidered by the bots then you should find your pages being indexed. If pages are not being indexed, have a closer look to try and determine why. Find and fix the issue and you will reap the rewards through search traffic.
