SEO II: No Broken Links, please

Search engines don’t like gos­sipy key word­ing, but they love well-filled sitemaps. But they detest bro­ken links.

The clas­si­fi­ca­tion by seman­tic HTML tags and good per­for­mance speak for the rel­e­vance of a site. That is rea­son­able. How­ev­er, such mea­sures to improve one’s own rank­ing are under­mined by ‘bro­ken’ or ‘dead links’. They are no longer served, nei­ther by con­tent from with­in nor out­side. Once they reach such a link, the search engine crawlers can­not com­plete their work. From this, the search engines con­clude that such an ‘unmain­tained’ site will not be as impor­tant, as it pre­tends to be: What is annoy­ing for the read­ers, also annoys the search engines.

But bro­ken links are easy to find and fix:

Solution

• Install the plu­g­in Bro­ken Link Check­er
• Acti­vate it.
• Go to Tools/Broken Links in your Word­Press dash­board.
• Clean up each defec­tive link.
• Dis­able the plu­g­in until the next check.

Background

A link check­er plu­g­in is ulti­mate­ly a site’s own crawler. Like a search engine, it crawls all built-in links. Those who refer to unreach­able servers will be admon­ished, as well as those whom the respon­si­ble serv­er claims to be unable to serve.¹ If you have a list of such links and the posi­tions where they occur, clean­ing them is only a mat­ter of crafts­man­ship.

The prop­er sources of the plu­g­in Bro­ken Link Check­er are host­ed on Word­Press’ own Sub­ver­sion repos­i­to­ry² The readme file there­in says that the Bro­ken Link Check­er is licensed under the “GPLv2 or lat­er”.

There are occa­sion­al­ly warn­ings about this plu­g­in: It could degrade the per­for­mance if it works con­tin­u­ous­ly. How­ev­er, this can be eas­i­ly pre­vent­ed by acti­vat­ing and deac­ti­vat­ing it on a case-by-case basis.

In addi­tion to the Bro­ken Link Check­er, the Google Search Con­sole, and the Bing Web­mas­ter Tools also pro­vide infor­ma­tion about irreg­u­lar­i­ties. And there are exter­nal tools for this pur­pose, too. But I think it’s bet­ter to start with the obvi­ous.

By the way, the oppo­site of a bro­ken link is an orphaned page. If such pages exist on a Word­Press-based site, they are hard to find auto­mat­i­cal­ly because — by def­i­n­i­tion — there is no link point­ing to them. Here, the human look into the own sitemap is more help­ful. Orphaned posts — on the oth­er hand — do not exist as long as the stan­dard post loop is still called some­where.

1. Error 404 [↩]
2. GitHub offers a clear­ly out­dat­ed ver­sion. [↩]