This site has nearly 10,000 pages on it, each page containing at least one link and usually 10-15 links, and at the beginning of July 2010, there were over 1200 broken links. Throughout the summer, I spent time fixing those broken links, and on September 20, 2010, I got the number of broken links in my link checker down to zero. It took a long time, but I think it was worth it.

Why Fix Broken Links?

Let’s face it, link checking is a chore that most web designers dislike.

Unless you only have a few pages on your site, checking and fixing broken links can take a long time. And the benefits to fixing them are not always very tangible. I spent time fixing links on pages that many of my readers have never (and possibly will never) see. But even that I found valuable. Here’s why:

• Broken links make your site look untended.
  When a reader clicks on a link and it goes to a 404 page it looks like the site owner doesn’t care about the contents. And if you don’t care about your site contents, then why should your readers?
• Removing broken links keeps your readers happy.
  When you remove a broken link from your text, you are not sending your readers off on a wild goose chase.
• Valid links help search engine spiders navigate your site.
  A key part of SEO is making your site friendly to the spiders. If they can find their way around your site, they can index it, and then your site will get more page views. But if links are broken, the spider can’t follow them.
• SEO is improved when pages are updated — and correcting links is updating.
  Search engines can tell when you’ve made a change to a web page, and will come back and re-spider it to see if they need to change their listings. By regularly fixing broken links, you are regularly updating pages on your site, which makes the whole site appear regularly maintained which gives you some extra “juice” in search engine rankings.

• Google recommends you check for broken links.
  In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google suggests that you “Check for broken links and correct HTML.” And that “following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site.”

What Link Checker Do I Use?

For my About.com website, I use an in-house tool created for About.com Guides. This is useful because there are many links on these pages that I don’t control. And by using this in-house tool, I can see the broken links that I can fix, while not checking things like the ad links that I can’t fix.

For my other websites I use the W3C Link Checker and Xenu’s Link Sleuth. I haven’t found a Macintosh native link checker that I like, so if you know of one, I’d love to know about it.