Find and Fix broken links in Blogger – Redirect broken links for SEO
Content is a king and that is the major on page SEO factor, you totally agree with this, right? Bots visits your pages and positions it top of the SERPS for that particular keyword only if you have perfectly optimized it. Getting targeted visitors relies on your blogs SEO factors. Other than bots your readers stick to your writings only if you offer them quality content. This is how and where your blog starts getting reputation.
As your blog grows overtime you cannot oversee it and perhaps some of your old posts start losing its normal traffic flow. There are many possible reasons for a blog post to lose its traffic and rankings. We are here to discuss about a main cause that degrades your blogs rankings which is 404 errors, broken links or dead links.
Google combats blogs that are low in quality such as backlinks from low quality sites, too many broken links etc. Broken links are not only bad for your SEO; it also annoys and gives a bad user experience. So what is a broken link? We have discussed it in several articles. Hyperlinks (internal links or external links) which points to pages that no longer exists are known as broken links. Here let’s see how to find and fix broken links in Blogger.
How to find and fix broken links in Blogger
Finding and fixing broken links is beneficial for your blogs SEO (search engine optimization). Fixing broken links helps you to avoid penalties and retain your blogs traffic as well. Broken links occurs when you change the URL of existing posts, changing the blog titles or due to bad internal linking.
All that you perform in order to well optimize the page, but have your redirected those old non existing URLs to the new existing ones .
Finding broken links in Blogger
You cannot detect all the broken links within your site (internal links) and pointing to your pages from external sites (external links). However with best internal linking practice and with proper SEO strategy you can greatly avoid these broken links.
Also read: Benefits of internal linking in SEO
In Blogger you do not have any plugins or add-ons in order to detect broken links. The only best scope to find broken links for people who run their blogs in Blogger is through Google webmaster tools. If you are not using Google webmaster tools then check out our article on how to add Blogger blog to Google webmaster tools. Google bot fetches and indexes all your sites valid URLs from sitemap. If you haven’t submitted your sitemap then learn how to create and submit Blogger sitemap to Google webmaster tools.
Google fetches all your sites broken links and displays it in a section called crawl errors. Login to your webmaster account and go to crawl >> crawl errors. Now you will see three segments such as server error, soft error and not found (404 response status codes). In “not found” you will see the list of all your blogs URLs that end up in 404 errors.
Just open each URL and see where it takes you to. If you found that the URL seems to have a valid content then simply mark it as fixed. If it ends in 404 errors then probably you might have change the post URL, deleted it or someone might have linked you badly. In such cases you have to redirect those URLs separately to some other page that you found to be useful.
Fixing Blogger blogs broken links
It’s time to fix all those detected broken links in webmaster tools. Redirection is the only way that you can fix your broken links. Blogger has an option called custom redirects where you can manage your redirects. We once posted a detailed article on Blogger custom redirects where you can learn to redirect within your blog.
At some point you will realize that some URLs have no meaning in redirecting and during such cases you can simply remove it from Google index. In webmaster tools go to Google index >> remove URLs and remove those silly URLs. Other than that you can also block URLs from robots.txt, learn more about Blogger robots.txt.
Mark all those broken URLs as fixed when you have done redirecting it to proper respective pages. Also check this useful guide on how to redirect 404 error pages to homepage in Blogger and use these free broken link checker tools for finding broken links.
We hope that you found this post useful in finding and fixing broken links in Blogger. Make your Blogger blog search engine friendly and improve the user experience by fixing broken links. Share it and subscribe to our blog RSS feeds to get latest updates.