Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin (BLC) is an essential SEO audit plugin.
This plugin is a lifesaver for any WordPress blog to remove broken links and fix redirects and comes in very handy when you are cleaning up your WordPress site. This plugin finds all the broken and redirected links and gives you many options to fix them.
Link Whisper is the best internal link building WordPress plugin. It offers features that can help you improve your internal links in hours or even days.
But before we discuss the Broken Link Checker plugin further, let’s talk about broken links.
What is a broken link?
A broken link is a link that does not link to an existing page. This is a "dead" link that contains a 404 error code.
For example, let's say you link to a page on a website, but that page has been removed. This causes the link to become broken. When a visitor clicks on that link, they will see a 404 error page .
But it doesn’t just affect users. When search engine bots discover broken links, they also receive a 404 status code, implying that the page doesn’t exist. From an SEO perspective, these broken links (aka dead links) can have a negative impact on your website.
If there are too many links, a website will suffer from a phenomenon known as “link rot.”
- So how do broken links appear on a website?
Well, in addition to linking to deleted pages, you also need to be careful if you are a popular blog that receives a lot of comments. Comments also contain links. If your site has been around for a while and receives a lot of comments, there is a good chance that you have a lot of dead links pointing to sites that no longer exist.
There are many bad link checker websites that can check for bad links on your website. But with WordPress, we have the power of plugins.
WordPress plugin to fix broken links
Broken Link Checker is a free tool for WordPress.
It helps you find all the broken links on your blog and highlights all the redirects.
This WP plugin checks all the URLs on your WordPress blog and provides you with a complete report of broken and redirected links.
How to Use the WordPress Broken Link Checker Plugin
- Download and install the plugin. Link
- How to Install a WordPress Plugin
- Activate the plugin and go to its settings by clicking Tools > Broken Links.
It may take some time (hours or even days) to scan your WordPress site for broken links (internal and external) and provide you with a report like the one shown in the screenshot below so you can take action.
In addition to displaying broken links, it also displays a status code to help you determine whether you must unlink, update, or take no action.
My advice is to update links instead of just unlinking them. However, if you have a large blog with thousands of broken links, it’s better to remove those 404 links instead of putting it off until later.
Configuration settings:
To configure your settings, go to Settings > Link Checker
In the General tab you can block search engine bots from following broken links. I highly recommend setting this.
Under the Find Links tab, you can configure the areas this plugin should crawl to find broken links. If your blog is content-heavy like mine, you can start by scanning the posts section. However, if your server is powerful (I use Kinsta ), you can check other options, such as the comments section. Here are the settings I use for ShoutMeLoud:
You can also set specific Server Load Limits under the Advanced settings tab.
**I found a broken link! **What should I do?
After running this plugin for a few hours, you are bound to find some broken links.
You can access the latest report at any time under Tools > Broken Links.
For comments, you can select all comments and choose Unlink from the drop-down menu .
For blog posts, I strongly recommend that you update the link rather than just unlink it; this will maintain the integrity of the original post.
The most interesting feature of this plugin is finding and fixing redirects. Over time, many people change their domain names and redirects, and some change their permalink structure, but old internal links continue to link to the old URLs.
The Broken Link Checker plugin checks all your redirects and lets you fix and update your redirect links with just one click.
Note: If you use affiliate links, these will also appear as redirect links, so make sure you don’t fix affiliate links.
If you ever change your domain name or permalink structure, or migrate from BlogSpot to WordPress or any other platform, this redirect feature will prove to be very useful.
Depending on the total number of links on your site, the plugin will take about 10-45 minutes to fix all broken and redirected links.
The last time I used this plugin, I ended up fixing almost 600 broken links on SidelinePlay!
Quick Tip: This plugin adds too many tables in your database which will increase your database size. So after using this plugin, disable it and use WP-DB Manager plugin to delete all the tables created by this plugin.
For your reference, here is the table created by BLC:
插件：_blc_filters、_blc_instances、_blc_links、_blc_synch
Regardless of which platform you use (WordPress or otherwise), broken links often have a negative impact on SEO. Whenever you perform an SEO audit of your website, be sure to use a broken link checker.
You can also use Ahrefs to find broken pages on your website.
Please tell us which WordPress plugin you use to find broken links on your blog. Have you ever used the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin? Let us know in the comments.
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Here are some handpicked guides for you to read:
- [9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins to Help You Rank Higher
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