I was reading a great post by Jerry West today about helping improve your spider activity and page rank by finding places where your site is linking out to URLs that are now showing errors.
He shared a great free resource for quickly analyzing your whole site to find out where your broken links are…
You can download the program here, it’s called Xenu and runs from your desktop.
A little analysis on my own blog revealed a common and unfortunate trend, and I’m willing to bet that if you have a blog that’s been up any period of time, you have this problem too and you might not even realize.
So like a good person, I leave Do Follow’s on my blog comments. I like to reward people for commenting, make this feel like a family, you know how it is…
But as it turns out, those commenters who I reward… some of them are hurting my site and they didn’t even realize.
The majority of the broken links on my blog were from people who had left comments and made mistakes in the URL they associated to their name!
I just look at the comment text when I moderate it, I rarely check to see if the site the person linked to is a real live link.
But as it turns out, people made mistakes… typos in their URL… their site is no longer live, and so on.
And unfortunately it’s a pain to fix too.
When Xenu tells you what the link URL is that’s broken, you go in your WP admin to COMMENTS and EDIT… then search for the URL here:
And change it to something. Maybe link to http://google.com or something, just so you know the link is at least live… OR remove it all together and take an extra outgoing link off your page.
This of course is just one of the kinds of outgoing link that can be broken, but after you’re finished with the comment problem areas you can move on to the other links and fix them up too.
The result will be a well oiled spider machine that’s ready for deep crawling, quality indexing and a boost in search traffic!
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Good post – and something many blog owners may not consider.
Another problem – and one I initially thought this post would be about – is spammers linking to a ‘bad neighbourhood’ in the url used for their comment name.
Rumour has it that being linked to from a spam site won’t affect your rankings (since you have no control over who links to your site), but linking TO a spam website is bad – since a website owner has control over where they link.
And I wonder if the Google spider knows (or cares) which outbound links are from the blog owner – ie. in content, footers, etc – and which are from commenters.
Just something else to consider.
Wow! These site visitors are really a pain in the bum sometimes:) I suppose this doesn’t affect me as my site uses no-follows. I didn’t choose that, it happens automatically. Not sure about the true meaning of all this no-follow or follows but I live in hope that I may fathom it out one day!
Hey Andrew,
This is fantastic! I didn’t know even think that commenters leaving mis-typed links would lead to poorer SEO. Since my blog is really rather new, I really know what to look for as I start to attract commenters.
Hopefully, I’ll never have to deal with ‘fixing’ this type of issue by knowing about it from the start.
Huh, I didn’t even realize broken outgoing links hurt your page rank. Good to know – thanks for pointing this out to us! I deliberately use DoFollow as well… really good to keep in mind.
I had never heard of Xenu until I read this post. Does it also help identify broken links within your website? Again great post.
Thanks for anther great post and resource. If you are meaning to use dofollow, I suggest you check your plugin because all the iks n your comments are currently nofollow.
Very good tip Andrew, Thanks. I often do check a commenter’s site before accepting the comment but I had no idea of this problem. I’d be interested to read your reply to Steve’s question. it is a problem that mostly affects forums but could harm a blog I guess
Hi Andrew, good catch! I hadn’t even thought about Google punishing me for other people screwing up their own links.
I checked mine, I promise
Thanks for the tips, i rarely check all these things
Good to see ya here Gobala – hope ur well!
Andrew
Thanks for the heads up, Andrew – I know Google hate broken links so I’m sure Xenu will be a very useful little tool for many marketers.
Also, I think Steve raised an interesting point about the risks of following “bad” sites. Where do you draw the line, though? Do you follow straight away, after X number of comments, after checking out the site, or do you need to continue to monitor all the sites you follow on an ongoing basis just in case they become a “bad” site?
Very useful program you recommend Andrew and thanks for the tips. I own a few do-follow blogs and never realised it could harm me seo-wise.
Btw, love your “no poop zone” image at the top, can I steal it!