I spent the recent holiday cleaning up Turnipofpower.com. Changing permalinks, removing database clutter, and fixing dead links were the three primary tasks performed. All of these areas deserve a separate post, so today I am going to focus on fixing dead links.
Dead links are links that give an error when you click on them. Turns out I had close to one hundred external dead links, and a few internal ones as well. Below are the most common reasons links were “dead”.
- Blogs removed or abandoned: These return a “forbidden”, “no such host”, “not found” error. Mostly located in your comment URL’s.
- Bad Affiliate Links: Linking directly to products on Amazon, e-Bay, and other affiliates cause most of these errors. Remember product pages change all the time.
- Mistyped URL’s: When typing a URL, any mistake at all will cause an error. Some people couldn’t even spell “blogspot” correctly. To be fair, I mistyped my own blog’s name a few times.
- Bad Cut and Paste Jobs: Sometimes WordPress users get lazy and just copy a link from an email and then paste it in without checking.
The Solution! I found a free tool that checks all external links on my blog called XENU Link Sleuth. It’s a tiny program that you download. Simply input your base URL, and it will spider your site. In my case http://turnipofpower.com/ is the base URL. It will show every external link, with the bad links in red. I had 4154 external URL’s. It found many bad URL’s on my site, which I’m now busy correcting where possible, and deleting the links I can’t fix. Right now I have zero bad links!
This helped some of my readers, who were either too polite or too embarrassed to ask me to fix the link on their comments. Ettarose benefited most, as she recovered 41 links now pointing to her new blog. Teasa got 8 links fixed. Stan got 3 links fixed. The word on the street is that dead links hurt your SEO efforts. I’m not sure about the effect on pagerank, but they certainly can’t help.
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Looks like a cool bit of software and I will try it out as soon as my translator finishes caching. Every time I update it, I get a thousand or so new 503 errors on Webmaster Tools…
A side note, I fell over laughing at Xenu’s Trademarks section: These products are not associated in any way with services licensed by RTC, CoST, BPI, CSI, etc.
Legion!
I have tried Xenu and found some dead links which I repaired with 301 redirects. However, Xenu continues to show bad links. Have you had any luck resolving problems like this?
Blessings
I use Xenu about once a month (which reminds me, I need to do this again). It has proved invaluable in finding my dead links. My only question is, correcting bad links in my comments section without deleting the comment?
Xenu works very well, what I do is set max level to 3 and to show dead links only. Then I tell xenu to check all links, and then click “recheck dead links”. Once I see all the errors, I right click on them and choose properties. That shows me my page and their link. I then open both in a browser. If I can correct the error, I will. For example, I know the person’s new site, other site, or fix the mispelling. If the site is dead, or obviously spam, I delete their URL, but leave their name and comment. Once I think I fix them all, I rerun xenu to make sure I was thorough.
Having read your earlier article about the importance of links management, I reckon this software would be very useful.
Thanks for sharing!
Incredibly useful. I’ve never really known how to go about this apart from tedious trawling through, or by accident. Mostly by accident in my case.
Thanks for sharing. Got to try this out. god Bless.
Thanks for the information i will try this…
I’ve tried it but it seems all my Wikipedia links come back Forbidden. All the same, very useful so thanks for the information.
I tried the program late last night and was amazed at how many dead links I had.
It was easy to figure out how to use the program, but your answer here about what you did with your dead links really, really helped. I wasn’t sure what to do. Now, I have a better idea. It’s going to be tedious, but I’ll ‘git ‘er done’. LOL Thanks!
Thank you Turnip! Either I’m not working enough or I’m working smart…who knows? I had three dead links. I really appreciate this information and all of the work and support you give to the blogging community. Laurie B. of The Looking Glass
Thank you so much, this tool is amazing. I’m running a check now and its already come up with at least one broken link. I didn’t realize I had that many outgoing links, but when a blog is do-follow it’s expected!
Thank you once again for offering readers like me something amazing!
Sheila: That “forbidden” may be a robots.txt or someone bot protection on that site. Try opening it in firefox, if you are still forbidden, delete it. Wikipedia has some strange rules, so I no longer link to them.
Just thought I’d add – not only check for dead links but also hyjacked links. These are links that are taken over and either have some advert attached to them or may have something lewd instead of the original page. The first time I came across one of these was in an email – the initial email contained a site which had a funny cartoon someone had passed on to me. I usually bin them but this particular one was rather good and so I thought I’d pass it on to a few people. I clicked onto the site to play it through one more time before sending it on (thank goodness)… and the content had completely changed … and it wasn’t something that you’d want your Grandma to see. Ever since then I have been wary. So for those who aren’t worried about the dead links I would urge them to check for rogue ones.
Does the site that you mention above check for any links that have changed? It would be nice to find a quick way of going through these also!
There’s an online tool called Bad Neighborhood that does what you want. http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm Check it out. I’m not sure if it will spider the entire site, but it does do a decent job of telling you what’s on the other end of a link. I don;t find it overly usefull, unless you are entirely clueless. For example, here are 3 questionable links, all 3 I know are harmless:
Questionable:
Found on: sanityonedge.blogspot.com/
URL: http://sanityonedge.blogspot.com/2008/11/cars-having-sex-and-my-dog-at-war.html
Anchor text: Cars Having Sex and My Dog At WarQuestionable:
Found on: razzball.com/
URL: http://razzball.com/razzball-historical-spotlight-pete-rose-1983/
Anchor text: Pete Rose nakedQuestionable:
Found on: aniceplaceinthesun.blogspot.com/
URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/WTITTapeRadioTheBlog/~3/474153550/cook-books-and-hot-sweaty-sex.html
Anchor text: Cook Books and Hot, Sweaty Sex
Oh Turnip, what the hell does that mean, there was a questionable link on my site? Please tell me how to fix it if I can. How do I prevent bad links in the future? I recieved an awesome surprise in the mail today. A TURNIP OF POWER T SHIRT!!!!! You know I had to put that in all caps. I will be taking a picture and posting it with a huge thank you. You are the greatest. Oh and thanks for the tip. As usual I learn so much from you. One more thing and then we can say I wrote a post ha ha. Thank you for fixing all my links. With starting over I can sure use the help.
Great tool. I’ve cleaned up a lot of dead links with this program. Thanks!
BTW, the tee arrived today – thank you!!!
Etta, as I said, don’t worry about that link. The program is wrong about the link being questionable. Enjoy your shirts!
I’m becoming increasingly jealous of ettarose, her links and her t shirts!
Thanks Turnip. I ran teh Bad Neighborhood checker. No bad links, no questionable links. I try to be careful, so far my efforts seem to be working.
Dan
Just used it. Thanks for the heads up on this. I didn’t have many but now I know how to find them!
You rock Turnip.