The Broken Link Checker tool is a crucial WordPress SEO audit plugin. For any WordPress site, this particular plugin is a lifeguard for fixing redirections and removing broken links and is helpful when you’re running SEO audits for your WordPress website. This plugin detects all redirected and broken links and gives you a lot of suggestions to get them fixed.
Before I dive into the discussion about the Broken Link Checker Plugin, let’s discuss a bit about broken links.
What are Broken Links?
Broken links are links that direct users to non-existent pages. They are links that contain some 404 error codes; so, they are regarded as “Dead” links for that matter.
For instance, let’s say a particular page was removed from a website after it’s been linked to. That results in a broken link. When visitors click through the page URL, they’ll experience a 404 error page, though this has no impact on users.
However, when search engine spiders detect a broken link, they also experience a 404 error code – meaning – that specific page doesn’t exist on the web. From a search engine optimization viewpoint, those dead links have a negative influence on your site.
If too many broken links are found in a site, it tends to suffer from what is known as “Link Rot”. Therefore, how do you get broken links?
Apart from linking to a non-existent page, you must take precautions if you seem to have a blog that has received lots of comments. You need to be extremely careful because comments too contain links and you can get lots of broken links to sites that don’t exist anymore.
There are a considerable number of broken-link-checker sites to leverage while checking for dead or broken links on your website. However, for a WordPress site owner, there are powerful plugins to help suffice that purpose.