Trace broken links

Broken links have got a serious negative impact on search engines and the visitors. Just imagine, if a visitor finds a link and on clicking he reaches a Page Not Found message, how impatient he can become! Similarly if the search engine crawlers find such broken links, it can raise their anger also.

There are several tools available on the web including google webmaster to trace the broken links.

A normal practice is to trace the broken links and eliminate manually. There is a chance that miss out a few links and even you may forget to eliminate and they keep on appearing until the search engine declares them as obsolete in its natural process, which is a highly time consuming affair. What happens in between, if the a visitor or crawler visits your website?

Its a good practice to handle 404 error or you can even route your redundant pages by several methods like URL forwarding in the .htaccess file or in the web page itself.

Even you can obscure the entire folder by using the robots.txt file placed in the root of your host. Permanent redirection is also possible and you will get a lot of advice all over the Internet.

Methods are not important for handling broken links, your attention is important, by which you need to cleanse the website on a periodic basis.