The Broken Link Checker

broken link, 404 error
If you have noticed from previous months, I have only 1 to 3 posts. The reason is that I focused mostly, on cleaning my blog posts from broken links and errors like 404, 500, schema and others. This is an SEO thing. I am not an expert in this field because I depend mostly on what I had researched through Google. If I find a website that is easy to understand, then I pause to read it before applying it on my blog. Also, as much as possible, I looked for the nearest year it was published. Every year, there are a lot of updates and changes.

Since my blogging platform is Blogger or Blogspot, I'll be facing HTML codes. I made sure that the guide published is easy to understand with or without photos. I will do the editing, manually. I'm not sure if there's another way to do it. All I know it's manual when it comes to Blogger or Blogspot platform.

As I've said above, I clean my blog with the help of posts that I researched as well as the link. I'll be sharing those links and the errors I've encountered on my blog.
Broken links are a website URL that is not working, anymore. These are inbound (your pages) and outbound (backlinks) hyperlinks. Here are the reasons why the inbound and outbound link returns an error. The causes are based on what I found on my blog:

  • The URL is expired. The blog owner did not renew the website's domain name. 
  • A blogger mistypes her domain name on a comment section of your post. Instead of typing, for example, http://broken.com, he wrongly types it to http://broken. I got this in one of my posts.
  • The Blogger profile was deactivated. 
  • The URL is too long to respond. The domain is loading slowly and takes time before it ends up dead. 
  • The owner has changed its URL posts. This causes  404 error, which means "The page is not found".

On the other hand, I just discovered that there are active hyperlinks that are sold and changed for to business websites. Here are the reasons why I removed the URL even if it's active.

  • The link though alive is perhaps sold and owned now by a Chinese. Instead of English, it was changed into the Chinese language, of course. It becomes a business website selling products from the new owner. I have nothing against Chinese but I want links in English to understand it not translate it.
  • The link though alive was selling products/accessories in pornography. This I found recently. 

The broken link checker that I used is  http://www.brokenlinkcheck.com . It's not only 404 but 500, bad host and 408 errors. This checker is FREE! I got hundreds of broken links when I first started it. Then stop, because it gives me a headache.

Last week, I got 89. I patiently removed dead links, day by day until I got 3 to 6 dead links. Whenever I checked every day, I always find 2 to 3 dead links. There is no forever but that's easy to remove now. I can live with that. Learning through hardships is worth it.

Do you have some tips or suggestion regarding my post? Kindly leave your comments below. I'll be happy to read and learn from you.

2 comments

  1. Thanks for this! I am a newbie so this is a big help. :)

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    Replies
    1. Your welcome Jona. I consider myself a newbie, too. :D

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