How to Find and Remove Broken Links in Your Website

March 23rd, 2010 by Omer Greenwald | 38 Comments | Stumble It! Delicious

Broken links are links that lead to pages that do not exist. When clicking on a broken link, the page you land on is called a 404 error page, a standard HTTP response that indicates that the requested URL doesn’t exist.

What do you do when you happily surf the web and suddenly come across a 404 error? For most of us, the immediate response would be to simply leave the current site in favor of another one because both people and search engines consider broken links as unprofessional.

404 errors and broken links also have negative effects on your search engine rankings so it is quite reasonable to be proactive in avoiding them to improve exposure and increase site traffic.

Note: there are terms and methods presented in this tutorial that address WordPress bloggers, however, this article is relevant to any website owner.

Bloggers update their blog’s content more often than other site owners do. Therefore, there is a higher chance for them to have broken links found throughout their website.

For WordPress blogs, there are two types of plugins that can be used to deal with those links:

Plugins that detect broken links in your site like Broken Links Checker.
Plugins that manage 301 redirects automatically like Redirection.

As a plugin minimalist, I always insist on doing things manually to avoid using and installing plugins. In this case, you can be rest assured that having the ability to deal with these problems efficiently is worth installing another plugin. (See the short list of plugins that Six Revisions uses.)

Whether you use a plugin or not, I highly recommend checking your website occasionally for broken links and 404 errors.

deadend

Detecting and removing invalid URLs using Google WebMaster Tools

There are two reasons why pages are indexed in Google even though they don’t exist in your website:

You referenced an invalid internal link by mistake because of a typo. This is the time to recommend a very simple yet essential plugin for post authors – the Link to Post plugin for avoiding such mistakes).
You published a post and decided to change its permalink afterwards (the post’s URL) after Google has already indexed the original link.

The best way to detect these errors is by using Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t done so already, register your site there. It’s an essential tool to have for anyone running a website.

One of the most important tools provided in GWT is the Remove URL tool, which allows you to remove invalid pages from Google search results.

Let’s see how to remove those bad URLs from Google’s index.

Detecting invalid pages that are indexed by Google

Once you have signed up for Google Webmaster Tools and have set it up and verified your site (see Google’s Getting Started guide for GWT), here is the process for finding invalid pages.

1 Click on Diagnostics from the left menu and select Crawl Errors.

2 Select the Not Found category.

3 If available, click to view which page contains the broken link.

4 To make sure that the URL is indeed indexed in Google, copy and paste the URL into Google’s search and see if any result comes up.

Detecting invalid pages that are indexed by Google

Removing URLs from Google’s search results

1 Click on Site Configuration, and select Crawl Access.

2 Select Remove URL.

3 Click on New removal request.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

4 Select the first option to completely remove a page from Google search results.

Select the fourth option in case you want to retain the page in search results but would like to remove the cached version of the page. This is useful in case Google displays an outdated version of the page in the "cached" link.

5 Click on Next.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

6 Type the URL of the page you would like to remove from Google.

7 Make sure the first option is selected and then click on Add.

8 The URL to be removed should now appear in the list. If you want, you can add more pages for removal.

9 Click on Submit Removal Request.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

Your request is now pending—in most cases, it only takes 2 to 3 days for Google to remove the URL.

10 Click on Site Configuration and select Crawl Access.

11 Select Remove URL.

12 Make sure the URL you requested to remove does not appear in the list of pending requests.

13 Click on Removed URLs to see that the URL is now listed there.

To make sure that the URL was indeed removed from Google, copy and paste the URL into Google’s search box and see if any result comes up.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

Detecting Broken Links using Xenu Link Sleuth

Another excellent tool I like using for hunting down broken links in my websites is Xenu Link Sleuth. You can download it here.

Unlike the WordPress plugins mentioned earlier in this article, Xenu is a standalone desktop application for Windows that outputs all your site links—whether they’re valid or invalid links—and groups them into a very readable fashion.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

After you install Xenu, using it is really easy.

1 Click on File and select Check URL.

2 Type your website’s URL (e.g. http://www.sixrevisions.com/).

3 Wait for all links (site wide!) to be checked.

4 When Xenu asks whether you want a report, click on Yes.

Removing URLs from Google's search results

You can enter your FTP server details, but I simply click on Cancel and Xenu generates an XHTML report locally (it opens a dialog window automatically).

In the generated report, click on Broken links. Sort it by link in the table of contents to see all the pages that have broken links in them (and the broken links of course).

Finally, once you’ve detected all broken links, what is left to do is to navigate to the posts and pages containing references to broken links. You should either fix or remove those links.

What are your own techniques and tools for finding broken links? How often do you search your site for broken links? How important is it to eliminate invalid links, and why?

About the Author

Omer Greenwald is a web developer, blogger and WordPress enthusiast. He specializes in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. You can check out his blog called WebTechWise, which shares tips and tutorials for bloggers and site administrators. To connect with the author follow him via Twitter as @WebTechWise.

38 Comments

Cheryl

March 23rd, 2010

Beautiful article. You mention Xenu (which I’ve used in Windows environments). If you’re on Mac, the wonderful “Integrity” (shareware: remember to donate) is just the trick.
http://peacockmedia.co.uk/integrity/
Cheers.

krike

March 23rd, 2010

I never search for broken links… untill now :D this is awesome :D exactly what I needed :) thanks

adone

March 23rd, 2010

Very good article. Thank you.

The Inside Design

March 23rd, 2010

Great article and very help for removing broken links on a website that show up from time to time. There are also plugins for example for Wordpress that make it easier to remove and/or redirect them as well.

Michael

March 23rd, 2010

good stuff, thanks for sharing, but to use the acronym GWT for Google Webmaster Tools is really misleading since GWT is widely known to refer to the Google Web Toolkit.

bbrian017

March 23rd, 2010

My blogs are fine but my social network blog engage has many broken links. I’ve been way to lazy to fix it and now it’s simply out of control.

I wish there was an easier way to accomplish this task. how cam I humanly remove over 225 broken links form my website?

I guess I will have to dedicate one weekend to broken link removal! This new depresses me a little lol.

Omer Greenwald

March 23rd, 2010

@Cheryl – Thanks for sharing the alternative app for mac, I wasn’t sure which one competes with Xenu.

@krike, @adone – I’m glad you find this post useful.

@The Inside Design – You are right that there are some more excellent plugins for this tasks besides that two I have mentioned.

@Michael – I wasn’t aware that this acronym was already taken, thanks for pointing that out.

Anders

March 23rd, 2010

I use Xenu regularly to check for broken links, that’s not such a big problem. Broken links are quite easy to detect and fix, but how do you find links that although they work doesn’t point to “suitable content”, ie the page you linked to have now been replaced with something entirely different.

Demir

March 23rd, 2010

that’s the only thing what i need for my websites. thanks!

Zach

March 23rd, 2010

My only experience has been using Google Webmaster Tools so it’s nice to see some other options. Thanks for the good read!

Nick

March 23rd, 2010

Another great tool we use for broken link reporting after launching a new site is http://www.linkpatch.com. It emails you in real-time when someone gets a 404 error and sends all the details you need to fix it.

Beth McLain

March 23rd, 2010

Really Interesting Post. It will come handy, definitely need to bookmark.

Omer Greenwald

March 23rd, 2010

@bbrian – I’m not familiar with tools that automatically deal with broken links. I guess the reason is that a human sense is involved in the process of deciding what to do with each specific link (whether to remove it completely including the linking text, remove only the hyperlink, or change the destination of the link).

@Anders – You are right that Xenu does not detect links that lead to irrelevant pages, do you know an application that does that?

@Demir, @Beth – thanks for the good words.

@Zach – Xenu is great for double checking Google Webmaster Tools and tracking additional broken links.

@Nick – it seems like a decent tool, however, you need to embed a script in your site for that, right? Anyways, it might be worth it.

JC

March 23rd, 2010

Thanks for this lovely post on Broken Links.
Very helpful. Especially the clearity of using Google webmaster tool & suggestion of “standalone apps” for checking the broken links.

I would request sixrevisions to post something more on SEO related topics relevant to server side technology point of view.

Andy Forsberg

March 23rd, 2010

If you don’t want to install anything you can just run SpyderMate on your site for free (http://spydermate.com).

Melody

March 23rd, 2010

I had previously seen a few broken links but never knew how to correct it..Thanks, I will surely handle them now!

Duane Kinsey

March 23rd, 2010

Terrific article Omer. I have just checked webmaster tools for my site and found some broken links. Removed immediately.
Thanks for such an informative post.

MAK

March 24th, 2010

nice one omer thanks for the nice stuff

Anna

March 24th, 2010

Your information help me a lot. Good job.keep it up. Thanks!

Jacob Gube

March 24th, 2010

Thanks for everyone’s comments! Just a reminder: If you know of any good links and resources on this topic, please do share it here in the comments!

BeBeN

March 25th, 2010

like usually…usefully article
thanks ^_^

iamronel

March 27th, 2010

so awesome..thanks sir ill be looking for this post a long time..:)

Harsh Agrawal

March 28th, 2010

Very nice info…on Wordpress I also prefer using broken link checker plugin

yoash

March 29th, 2010

ahh great! I just removed two 404’s via the method mentioned above. thank you!

Lana

March 30th, 2010

You may check for broken links here, too:
http://validator.w3.org/checklink

Omer Greenwald

March 31st, 2010

@Andy – That’s a nice tool. thanks for sharing
@Lana – W3 validator seems to check only a single URL/page instead of finding broken links site wide. thanks

NavaPavan

April 6th, 2010

Wow that’s amazing. Thanks for sharing.

rita morgan

April 10th, 2010

I’ve been looking at 15 Not Found link errors on my site for some time now and I finally know how to get rid of them. I really appreciate your help :-D

Jonathan Matthews

April 11th, 2010

Thanks for the interesting article. My company has a product (DeepTrawl) which makes link checking & fixing site-wide really easy. If you’d like a license to check it out properly please let me know.