How To Fix Broken Links And Broken Pages
Broken links and broken pages will make it difficult to rank your website. But first let’s make a clear distinction about what qualifies as broken pages and what broken links are.
What is a broken page?
Simply put a broken page is a page that does not exist on a website. Yet it has hyperlinks pointing to its existence.
What is a broken link?
A broken link is a hyperlink from an EXISTING PAGE that points to another page that DOES NOT exist, so in effect that LINK is “broken”.
Why make a distinction between the two?
It has a lot to do with how you fix either one of them for MOWG purposes. Of course some guy’s, for cheaper runs of course, can just try to pump out new pages in the hopes of “covering up the holes”. But this doesn’t always work out well. Another approach could be the “Search and Replace” tool, but as you and I both know this is a lot of trouble.
So what do you do…? Read on and see how this 100% free software can help you avoid both on your MOWG sites.
Broken Links Will Hurt Your Rankings
Few things can hurt your page rankings and indexing as bad as broken links or broken pages. There are a few on-line broken page checker apps out there, but the problem with most of these tools is that they cap you at a certain number of pages. They usually max out at around the 3000 to 5000 page mark.
On top of that these on-line tools will show you what pages have Broken Links but almost NEVER which PAGES are “broken”.
This of course, is no good for MOWG purposes.
I have been through the “trenches” lately trying to find a reliable, not too expensive broken links checker and I struck gold… and I’m here to share the good news (and software of course), and believe it or not it’s completely free.
More than just find the broken links AND pages on a site this software also generates a full report at the end which not only shows which links are broken… but it also shows you which pages LINK to that broken page. This is a big deal because just by using that report alone you can immediately determine exactly HOW to deal with the broken links.
So how do you fix broken links and broken pages?
How To Fix Broken Links.
If you have a broken link on one single page (e.g. your sitemap.html), you can open that particular directory on your hosting server and simply download it, remove the “offending” link and re-upload to overwrite or simply do it straight from the “code editor” in you cPanel account. This is simple stuff right?
Fixing a broken link is just a case of removing the offending link and you’re done.
You can download the software from the resources page.
There is a problem with the sound so please turn up the volume on your speaker…
How To Fix Broken Pages.
If you have a broken link on one single page (e.g. your sitemap.html), you can open that particular directory on your hosting server and simply download it, remove the “offending” link and re-upload to overwrite or simply do it straight from the “code editor” in you cPanel account. This is simple stuff right?
Now how about if you had 400 pages linking to a non-existent page? Again, this is where the software is at its most useful… You could of course download the 400 pages and do a find and replace to remove the bad links… but that would take a heck of a long time to do and the slightest error… well let’s just say you’d have to do it a couple of times before you get it right.
Now exactly because this software tells you how many pages hyperlink to that broken page it lets YOU decide whether it’s more practical to remove the hyperlink OR create a manual page where the broken page should have been. So all you need to do is build that 1 single page manually and voila… you’ve just fixed 400 broken links in a single step.
Now is that cool or what? So from now on Broken Links And Broken Pages should not be a problem for you anymore. Make sure you watch the video below!