Oct
16

How to get rid of broken links - 404 errors from your website

Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 16-10-2008

Please keep the number of 404 errors and broken links on your site to the minimum, or none if possible, says Google. The basic idea is to help the robots index content more efficiently from websites and help index relevant information.

Both you and me would have number of 404 errors on your blogs and websites, now in order to align yourself more towards the league of good guys who follow the standard guidelines, let’s see how we can detect and avoid the number of broken links on a website.

  1. Making use of Google Webmasters
    Google Webmasters is a wonderful tool that can help you in detecting and getting rid of broken links (or all those errors) from your site.
    Join in using your Google ID at Webmasters and add your site to the account.
    For this you have to,
    i) Add your website by providing the URL
    ii) Verify that you are the webmaster by uploading a file or adding a meta tag to the files.
    iii) Submit the XML sitemap
    After submitting the XML sitemap, you have to wait for the nest successful indexing to happen. This depends on your crawling frequency.
  2. Finding out the errors
    Soon after the next successful indexing is done, while you visit the Webmasters dashboard, you will be greeted with all the errors possibly found on your website. And this includes broken links, http errors, 404 errors, broken sitemap files etc.
    broken-links
  3. Trace the broken link
    Click on the “Linked from” page to get a popup that will give you the URL that carries the broken link.
     broken-links-404
  4. Find out the URL from your website and delete it.
    It might be from one of those articles you linked to, which is no longer existing or a dead link. Most of the time Google will tell you the exact URL that’s suggesting the broken link. So just get rid of it.
  5. Now, rebuild your sitemap and resubmit to Google through Webmasters
    Wait for a fresh new indexing. If you have successfully deleted all broken links you should not see that yellow, annoying icon in your dashboard !

Keeping your site clean off broken links and http errors are a sign that you are a “good guy” to search engines. It’s just a simple ignorable thing but technically, will pass lot of value to you.

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  1. Dennis EdellNo Gravatar

    Cool, I’ll check it out….just for broken links I use a broken links plugin, and done in seconds.

    [Reply to this comment]

  2. PrasadNo Gravatar

    Ye good one, we use dead link checker tool and then update the same using site map.

    [Reply to this comment]

  3. Amit BanerjeeNo Gravatar

    Last week In my Google webmaster tools Report I have found an unusual Crawling Error

    The URL under the “Not Found” Column was Linked from Two Pages.I checked Both these pages but could Not found the URL.I checked the HTML source Code too.

    Now what should I do ? Remove the “Not found” Url from the Index from Tools–> Remove URLS ?.I have tried this too but to no Success.

    I am using ” XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.1.2 ” Plugin

    [Reply to this comment]





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    Mani is a blogger and SEO/SMM consultant from India ,working on search engine optimization and social media projects for clients, small and big, across the world.
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