Find and Fix Broken Links

It's bad when a visitor clicks on a link and gets an error page or something other than what was expected. If you have a links page or make frequent additions and deletions on your site, you should check for broken links on a regular basis.

How Links Get Broken

Broken links can happen for a variety of reasons:

  • A web page on your site is moved or deleted.
  • A web page on someone else's site is moved or deleted.
  • A web site ceases to exist (a frequent occurence).
  • A typo or incorrect capitalization in the URL address.

Broken links are easy to fix - they must be updated or removed.

How To Find Broken Links

  1. W3C Link Checker - This tool will check a single page of your web site. Simply enter the web address (URL) of the page you want to check, and the checker will visit the page and verify each link within the page, including links to web pages, other web sites, images, style sheets and anything else linked within the page. If you want to check more than one page on your site, set the recursion depth, which specifies how many pages deep the link checker should go into the site. A setting of 2 or 3 should be sufficient to check each page of your site.
  2. Google Webmaster Tools - If you've set up a webmaster account with Google, you have access to a bunch of reports about your site, one of which is a "broken links" report. This covers your entire site, so it can be a very valuable monitoring tool. From your dashboard, click on your web site link, then Diagnostics, then Web Crawl, then Not Found to see the broken links report. If you have a links page on your site, you should check this report regularly. You can contact us for help if you need assistance getting this set up.
  3. Install a Link Checker - We use a program called WebTester - it does the same checking as Google, but it's installed on your web site and you can run it as often as you please. All it requires is the ability to run PHP on your web site. Contact us for installation.

Ideas for Fixing Broken Links

  • Try to find an updated link - If the link is on your site, contact your webmaster for a fix. If the link is to a specific page on another web site, try visiting just the domain name part of the address. For example, if the link goes to www.somesite.com/somepage.html, trying going to just www.somesite.com - perhaps you can find the original information in a new place. If you find it, send the new link to your webmaster.
  • Find a replacement link - The web is a very transient place, with sites coming and going all the time. You can always search for a site offering something similar and replace the old with the new.
  • Remove the link