How To Fix Broken Links On Your Website

The first step is to download and use Xenu's Link Sleuth. This is a cool freeware program for Windows that can check your entire site in seconds. You'll see a large list of every URL in your site it can find, and URLs that got an "Page Not Found" error will be marked red. (Keep the window open, and read on!)

Alternatively, you can use the official w3c linkchecker online. Xenu's Link Sleuth is a lot faster and leaner though.

Hint: You can also use this tool on someone else's site. People love you for helping them with their site!

Sign up for Google webmaster tools! It's cool and it's free. And if you haven't done so already, sign up now. This tool basically allows you to see all problems Google has found on your site.

If you go to "Crawl Errors" you'll see an overview of missing pages Google found. These will also include pages not linked to on your site anymore, but which still show up in Googles results. Note the missing pages and head on to the fixing section!

You really didn't need that page anymore? Make sure you delete all links to it. If the page has moved, update all references to the new location.

Are your visitors trying to reach pages that you moved to another spot, or to another site? Then mark them as moved. On most sites you can do this by modifying a htaccess file on your webserver.

The reason I added this step is because other sites might still have a link pointing to the original location of pages you moved. All links on your own site should already point to the new location.

If you are referencing interesting articles on your site, it's a shame to find out they don't exist anymore. To make sure your visitors can still take a look at your resources after they've gone, add a WebCite. WebCitation.org allows you to make a free copy of content you'd like save, and you can add a link to the copy on your site next to the original.

Here's an example of how you might use it:

References used for this article

1. Example Webpage. http://www.example.org. Accessed: 2010-04-11. [Archived by WebCite]