Finding Broken Back Links
-
Hello there
I am new here but really want to mend my broken website by myself as I enjoy a challenge!
I used to have great rankings but have moved websites a few times (same domain) and the last move was to wordpress. I now have loads of broken links in the SERPS and wondered if there was an easy way to flush google of them as they are getting lots of 404 errors? They really are too many to do a 301 on (I have done the main pages)
Also how do I do a crawl of my website for any internal broken links? Does SEOmoz have something or is there an external program you would recommend?
Thanks
Victoria
-
I would second the Screaming Frog tool, just used that yesterday and it's great! Might even buy a licence for it now. The free versions great though.
-
As far as i'm aware google doesn't have a maximum amount of 301's for a website, or, it won't penalise you for having too many. Make sure you keep an up to date sitemap submitted to google. I use Yoast SEO for that
Broken Link Checker is a good plugin to manage broken links from within your site. You can manage them all from a dashboard within wordpress so you don't have to visit each page individually.
Hope that helps.
-
Hi Victoria
Seeing as you're now on Wordpress, there's a couple of plugins you may find useful.
First is Link Juice Keeper - this will redirect any 404s that are caused by any external sites linking to you. The links are redirected to the root domain to ensure any strength is passed.
Another is Broken Link Checker - as you may have guessed, this will notify you if you have any internal broken links.
Link Juice Keeper might sound appealing, but I don't think you can redirect certain pages to specific locations, I think it all just goes to the root domain (but I could be wrong).
Screaming Frog is another great tool that would let you find broken links.
Hope these help
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
301 Redirect back to original domain
We have a site, domainA.com and we split part of the site off into it's own site a couple of years ago as domainB.com. All urls from DomainA were 301 redirected to DomainB, but with a different folder structure. For business reasons, we now shuttering domainB and rolling it back into domainA. For the 301 redirects for urls that were on the original domainA, should I overwrite them to the new folder structure directly from the original urls? In other words: 301 redirect domainA.com/oldstructure to domainA.com/newstructure rather than: Existing 301 redirect domainA.com/oldstructure to domainB.com/newstructuretopic with a new 301 redirect to domainA.com/newstructuretopictopic
Technical SEO | | ang0 -
Link Spam from Competitor Help
A clients link profile is recently getting lots of spam links related to "abortion pills" and "does my husband cheat" I found a few of the sites that link, and it appears that there is some malicious code on the site injecting links at the top of the site. http://www.med-reporter.at/index.asp?men=Gesundheit&submen=Produkte&artid=1587&kategorie=&blockzl=3 Can anyone look at the link above and tell me what network or software is creating these links?
Technical SEO | | webbroi0 -
Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem?
Hi, Changing broken links and Anchor text be a problem? We have 80K pages which has about 40K links which has been created in the last few years and from last month we have been working on updating content on those pages that's old and links that are broken and changing the anchor text in those posts. Anchor text like Click me, Here,Download, link, etc is changed to meaningful words. its a total close to 10K link replacements and 10K anchor text. While doing this from last month have seen a slight decrease in daily traffic. is this something Google would consider as some kind of a wrong webmaster activity? or its just fine? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
What is meant by to many on page links
I have just done the report for my site http://www.in2town.co.uk and it says i have 246 on page links but i am not sure how come i have got that many. I know i have a large number of links and in the old days it says that you should keep the links under 100 but now with website speed and the net, people are saying this is no longer listened to. A report i read said that the links should not confuse the reader or put them off, so i am just wondering what your thoughts are on a site with over a 100 links on the home page and also if my site does have to many links what should i do about it. I cannot understand why it is showing 246 when i do not see that many on the page, any advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Are my Canonical Links set up correctly?
I have Enable Canonical Links (recommended) on my web site. However, I also have THIS checked: Enable full URL for Home Page Canonical Link (include /default.asp) Is it hurting me??? Keep getting dinged on our report card. We are using the Volusion shopping cart software/platform.
Technical SEO | | GreenFarmParts0 -
Javascript funtion as link? Why not show up?
We joined our Chamber of Commerce for the "link" as much as anything. After 9 months of having a link from our local chamber it has never showed up anywhere. You can see the link on my Chambers page, and you can click on it and it works. But it does not show up anywhere else....Not in any backlink checker, not in SEOmoz, not in Google Webmaster Tools. When I hover over our link on their page I see "javascript:encodeclick........my url" Is this link worth anything? What is a javascriptencodeclick? Does Google know it exists and give me credit for it? Our Chamber is clueless... they hire someone to do their website. Their webmasters response to my question was: Hi, These links look like this because this is just the way our system parses URLs that are entered into the membership directory so they can be clickable when displayed in the lister. These links will not have a negative effect on Google or SEO indexing purposes if that is what you are concerned about. They are not encoded or encrypted, this just happens to be the name of the Javascript function.
Technical SEO | | SCyardman0 -
Broken Inner Links - Tool Recommendations?
Do you have any recommendations for tools that scan an entire website and report broken inner links? I run several UGC centered websites and broken inner links, and external, is an issue. Being that these websites are several hundred thousand pages large, I am not really all that excited about running software on my desktop (xenu link sleuth for example). Any online solutions you could recommend would be great!
Technical SEO | | uderic0