Search and Destroy Broken Links With A Plugin

January18

Google, the superior search engine sees an outgoing link from a page as a vote to the landing page of the link. We can give our votes to every page we want but we are having our blogs on the Internet close to being owned by Google. This means, even if we wanted to link to others, we have Google’s rule to follow.

Google, in their webmaster guidelines, under the heading Design and content guidelines, point 7, states that bloggers and webmasters must check out and prune broken links from our sites.

Photo by: laffy4k

As a blogger, we always focus on our new contents like what I have mentioned in Vital Sections for a Blog Clean Up, it is important to revisit our old posts to keep them updated and of course, to remove or update broken links!

Dig Out Broken Links With Just A Click

Sites that we link to might have been removed, deleted or taken offline. Scanning through a huge pile of old posts to find for broken links is a tiring chore but it will be as easy as surfing the Net if you know the right plugin for this problem!

Broken Link Checker is a great plugin for Wordpress blogs which is able to pick out broken links from your old posts and present them to you in a list under Manage –> Broken Links in your admin panel.

If your posts are free of broken links, you will get the message below.

However, if you have a long list of broken links, you will have the choice of to view and edit the posts or to discard the message. However, if you choose the option to discard, the message will be there again when you are back to the Broken Links page until an action has been performed to clean up the broken links.

Amazingly, this nifty little plugin also helps to dig out missing images which might have been accidentally deleted by you or your image host. It will be shown within the list of the broken links.

Broken Link Checker Settings

Under the Options –> Link Checker page, you will be able to set at what intervals (in hours) that the plugin will check your posts for broken links and the work session lengths.

These options will help to reduce your server load if your blog is under a lot of requests due to high traffic.

Dig and Destroy Broken Links With Broken Link Checker Now

At first, I installed this plugin just to write up this review but now, I won’t be uninstalling it because it is just so useful. If it is not because of the plugin, I might not able to know that I have 12 broken links within my blog posts!

What do you think about this plugin? How much broken links have been discovered after you have it installed on your blog? What improvements do you think the plugin editor can add to this plugin?

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posted under Internet Business Tricks

17 Comments to

“Search and Destroy Broken Links With A Plugin”

On January 18th, 2008 at 7:09 pm Deimos Tel`Arin Says:
If it is not because of the plugin, I might not able to know that I have 12 broken links within my blog posts!
LOL you are a bad link manager!

What do you think about this plugin?
I think it is a very useful plugin.

How much broken links have been discovered after you have it installed on your blog?
Haven’t tried it out yet. Gonna bath soon. Sorry can’t resist must reply now. First poster FTW! Hurrah! I’ll tell you my findings later.
Gonna bath now. Later yo.

What improvements do you think the plugin editor can add to this plugin?
Har? What do you mean? I don’t understand this question.
On January 18th, 2008 at 9:24 pm pablopabla Says:
This is just what I need! And it just links nicely to what I have written recently.
On January 19th, 2008 at 4:16 am Ruchir Says:
Great find Wayne, you’re digging up some great plugins these days
On January 19th, 2008 at 6:11 am Ruchir Says:
Ah sadly the plugin doesn’t run and it says I’ll have to install curl and gd on my vps…
On January 19th, 2008 at 7:12 am Mystery Says:
I was looking for exactly something like that! Thanks for sharing….

Alot of wordpress plugins saved us loads of work!

Mystery,
Mystery Online Autoincome Turbo Cash Money Making Systems
On January 19th, 2008 at 8:12 am Zath Says:
I’ve just run this on my blog and it said I had 8 broken links, I’ve now gone through and corrected this, I wouldn’t have even known otherwise - thanks very much!
On January 19th, 2008 at 12:02 pm Louis - HomeBiz Resource Says:
It’s a great plug-in helps bloggers find out dead links. A lot of similar tools only show up numbers of broken links and which links are broken but they don’t show us WHERE. but this one is very useful.

i’ve been using it for a couple of months and sometimes there are 1-5 dead links. however, sometimes it generates false alarms, but that’s okay with me.
On January 20th, 2008 at 7:31 am Ed Kohler Says:
This is a great plugin. If you tend to link to mainstream news sites rather than blogs, you’ll probably see much higher levels of broken links since they tend to hide things over time.
On January 20th, 2008 at 2:10 pm Wayne Liew Says:
@ Deimos
You should try it out. I am not a bad link manager, it is just sometimes people run away from being linked by me!

@ pablopabla & mystery
I am glad that this plugin helped you guys out.

@ Ruchir
Then you should have them installed. Do you need any extra cost to install those on your VPS?

@ Zath
Thanks for stumbling my post. Yes, I wouldn’t know I have 12 if not because of this plugin.

@ Louis
False alarms? Yes, I experienced it when one site is temporarily down but as you said, this is nothing compared to the benefits.

@ Ed
I don’t understand why don’t they just document their news so that students can access them for History class in the future.
On January 20th, 2008 at 8:53 pm Best of the ‘Sphere 21/1/08 | TechnoMoney | Smashing Blogging Tips Says:
[...] Search and Destroy Broken Links With A Plugin from WayneLiew [...]
On January 21st, 2008 at 1:01 pm Louis - HomeBiz Resource Says:
my false alarms rings not to down sites, but to referral links. something like “www.somekindaprogram.com/ref.php?id=111″
i wonder if the plugin doesn’t work well with referral links..
it doesn’t bother too much, but every time it showed a number of broken link and i checked out, it turned out only valid links falsely identified. a couple of seconds wasted..
On January 21st, 2008 at 5:30 pm Wayne Liew Says:
So far, the plugin is working well for me, even though my blog also have some referral links in the old posts.
On January 31st, 2008 at 5:58 am Make ,000,000 blogging, learn to use Twitter, and get banned for buying Diggs | Chris Bloczynski dot Com Says:
[...] how you can check for broken links on your Wordpress blog by installing a simple plugin. Thanks, Wayne [...]
On February 4th, 2008 at 2:03 pm Gab Goldenberg Says:
Thanks for sharing this Wayne. Just downloaded the plugin. It’s not only in their guideliens, btw, but in the Google Librarian Center newsletter, issue 2.
On February 4th, 2008 at 9:22 pm Wayne Liew Says:
You subscribed to that? Do you find it useful?
On February 5th, 2008 at 5:14 am Kaloyan Tsvetkov Says:
Thank you for the good words about the Broken Images wordpress plugin
On February 6th, 2008 at 2:01 am Wayne Liew Says:
Cheers. I am just providing a review for it since it may be useful for my readers.