QCQ - Check Your Blog For Broken Links?
24 January, 2008 - Blogging, Quick Questions - 11 Comments
I’ve been searching. Searching for a WordPress plugin. Searching for a WordPress plugin that is used on many blogs, but seems to be elusive to my eyes. It’s the “Related Posts” plugin, for those wondering.
I’ve spent the evening working on my new blog design so I’ve been looking for the plugin ready for use when I launch.
Broken Links
Almost every site I found that discussed the plugin had download links to pages that no longer existed. It’s terribly frustrating, to say the least.
Blogging Is An Evolving Medium
Blogs evolve. They’re an interactive journalistic medium, as opposed to being static like a newspaper. And that means bloggers link to other interactive and evolving articles. And that means in the midst of all this linking, eventually we end up with dead links. And these annoy poor souls like myself who don’t want to hit 404 Error pages for an hour after a day of work.
How Do I Check For Broken Links?
I just found a fantastic WordPress plugin to check for broken links. I’ve installed it and it’s checking my blog as I type this. It’s found nine broken links so far! Ouch!
Install and activate the plugin as normal, then go in to WP Admin > Options > Link Checker. Then click the “Re-check all pages” button and give it a few seconds. The status text should start to change to tell you how many pages it has left to check and how many broken links it has found.
So today, in my third Quick Community Question, I’m asking you quite a simple question:
Question: Have you ever checked your blog for broken links? If you have, do you do it on a regular basis?
I’ll start the discussion with my answer in the comments. Please join in with your answer and opinion.
This post was a part of my Quick Community Questions series. So many questions, so few words. That’s the basis of QCQ. Have a question? Email me and I’ll ask the community.
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Posted on 24 January, 2008 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under Blogging, Quick Questions |
11 Comments»
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Unfortunately, today was the first time I ever checked this blog for broken links. :blush:
Thankfully I now have the plugin installed so it will check automatically when I open up the admin panel. No more broken links for me.
How about you?
I’ve never checked my links. I’m a little scared to now, since the blog has been going for 2+ years. But that does sound like a great plugin.
How about these:
http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related+Entries
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/
Unless you have found the plugin.
2 years? Ouch! I’m interested to hear how many broken links the plugin finds, Nick.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll take a look, because I never did find one that would work for me.
“No broken links found.
The work queue is empty.”
Not sure if I ran it right or not. But that’s what it says.
Did you click the “Re-check all pages” button? I would be very surprised (and jealous), if you had no broken links after two years.
Yep, I hit recheck. I am surprise too. You would think I would have atleast 1 bad link.
I wish I could say I did this, however I don’t
But I will now that you’ve mentioned it as the idea never even crossed my mind, Jamie!
Yeah…broken links are unpleasant. And usually those are neglected by the blog admin. Thank you for bringing it up to our attention and also for the tips.
Thanks for the plugin. Broken links are definitely frustrating from a user point of view, but even worse for a webmaster.
How was you trip to NY btw? Sorry I couldn’t make it out.
Hey Gyutae,
Not a problem. New York was great fun, and as it happens, I probably would have been really pushing for time if we had met. The weather held out for me so I spent plenty of time in Central Park. I got back this morning after 24 hours of travel (I was in Ohio for a week after NYC, so it took me four flights in 24 hours to get home).
The whole trip was good fun and it gave me time to get a new business plan in place for this blog. More soon.
I hate it when I’m visiting a site where most of the links are broken. I just get to thinking “This one ought to be really good” *click* and the error page pops up. It’s terribly frustrating. Anyway, I never really considered that there might actually be broken links on My site! Funny how that works… anyway, thanks for the reminder, I’ll be checking my site for those obnoxious broken links.