How to Find and Fix Broken Links on Your Website. If you have a website, Im sure youve put a lot of hard work and long hours into making it a valuable resource for your visitors. But if your links arent working, it can derail all of your hard work. Broken links on your website can be harmful in two ways They make for a bad user experience When users click on links and reach dead end 4. They devalue your SEO efforts Broken links restrict the flow of link equity throughout your site, which impacts rankings negatively. To avoid these potential pitfalls, you should periodically check for broken links on your entire website. If youre wondering how to do this, youre not alone. The good news is weve done this work before and weve documented everything in a step by step, easy to follow process, which we hope you find helpful. So here is a comprehensive guide to helping you find and fix broken links across your website. Step 1 Find broken links. There are a number of tools you can use to identify broken links, many of them free. Google Analytics is a great free tool for tracking website performance, and its also helpful for easily finding broken links. First, log into your Google Analytics account and set the evaluation period for the amount of time you want to look at. If you check for broken links monthly, set the period for the month since your last check. Here I will use the Word. Export Xenu File To Excel' title='Export Xenu File To Excel' />I think to delete a file from the run box you can if you like cheat by trying cmd. Points Import Software for AutoCAD Pointor. Import, View and Save as DXF, lists of points from Excel, Access and Text files. Pointor US57. 50 is capable. Great article, its really useful especially for analytics. One little issue with Xenu, it uses a lot a bandwith and CPU if the settings are set to high, and might. The FairTax is a proposal to reform the federal tax code of the United States. It would replace all federal income taxes including the alternative minimum tax. Web Site Test Tools and Site Management Tools More than 570 tools listed in 14 categories. Organization of Web Test Tools Listing this tools listing has been. Stream account as an example, with the time period set for April 1, 2. April 3. 0, 2. 01. Go to Content Content by Title on the dashboard, and load the page. Create a filter at the bottom by typing in the title of your websites 4. Filter Page Title Containing. A list of useful free software for the office, web development, and computer programming. Free Downloads. I reviewed 189 SEO tools. See the best free and paid tools right here. If you are on a budget then you can take advantage of the best free SEO tools internet marketing software. Learn how to get the most out of themThe title of Word. Streams 4. 04 error page reads Sorry, theres been an error and this page may not exist. Dont leave though All kinds of nonexistent or broken links will trigger the 4. Most websites do little with this page, frustrating site visitors. But at Word. Stream, we optimize the page to take advantage of this valuable piece of real estate internal links to important pages are listed right below the error, along with a Contact Us form. The next step is to click the Go button on the Google Analytics filter page. Then click on the page title to view details. In our example, the Word. Stream 4. 04 error page was visited 1. Usb Floppy Disk Drive Samsung. April 1 and April 3. For easier navigation, you can change the rows shown per page from 1. Google Analytics offers the ability to set email alerts to get these broken link reports on a regular basis, as well as to export broken link details. Remember that redirecting and fixing broken links is an ongoing process. For the average website, once per month is an appropriate cycle. Another free tool we recommend is Xenu Link Sleuth. After youve installed the Xenu software and opened the tool, go to File Check URL, and enter your websites domain. Uncheck the box named check external links, and click OK to run the analysis. Note that if its the first time youve used Xenu, it can take a little while to complete the report. So be patient. Step 2 Create a report and track your changes. After identifying your broken links, create an Excel spreadsheet to track link redirect processes. Name it something like Broken Link Redirect Report. In Google Analytics, you can export the report you just created by clicking Export CSV for Excel on the top of the page, and downloading the file. For our purposes, we only need the data on broken links, page views and unique page views, so copy and paste these data columns into the Excel spreadsheet you have created. You can export data from Xenu too click on File, then Export to Tab Separated File, and then open that text file with Excel. Next, organize the main data from Google Analytics and Xenu into separate sections on your Excel spreadsheet. It will look similar to this Step 3 Analyze data and decide which pages should be redirected. After all the preparation, we come to the important stage. Both Google Analytics and Xenu give us a list of links that may be broken. But before actually redirecting them, you should first analyze the pages and the reasons they may not be working properly. From the Google Analytics section of the short sample above, we can see that not all broken links are created equal. Some links are actually visited quite often while others are not. Many instances of broken links or visits to a stray URL occur only once. These URLs may be a product of human error or someone mistyping an incorrect URL into the address bar and may not be worth fixing, like links 7 and 8. However, broken links with multiple visits are probably worth the time and effort to fix as they show a trend even if it is one of human error. Also, for some links, we can easily figure out the correct URL and fill in the data in the spreadsheet for other links, we can put a tentative URL there and highlight it with a different color and for the rest of the links, we can redirect to the domain homepage. In conclusion, we will only redirect the links with many visits and those with an underlying error causing rule. The Xenu report has the advantage of not displaying URLs that were recorded in your analytics because of a typing error. All the links shown in Xenu are actually existing links that live on the site. But these URLs may still contain character errors. For example, links 4 and 5 are caused the by the same problem is replaced by 2. When we identify these instances, we need to determine the cause and fix the same problem across all instances. This step will be complete once youve located the links that need to be redirected and  documented them all in your Broken Link Redirect Report. Step 4 Redirect in CMSFinally, its time to actually redirect the broken links in your content management system CMS. I will use Word. Streams Drupal CMS as an example. Go to Administration Site building URL redirects. Click Add redirect. Fill in the From and To blanks by copying and pasting from the final Broken Link Redirect Report. Pay attention to the link format during the process. Select 3. 01 Moved Permanently in the drop down Redirect Type menu. Click Create new redirect. Repeat the above process to redirect all the broken links and update the Broken Link Redirect Report.