When analysing a website to ensure that it is “search engine friendly”, one of the tools that is essential for any search engine optimiser is a broken links report. 

As you know, the internet is built on the concept of links.  To view any page on your website or any other website, you start from a link.

When a search engine spider arrives at your website to retrieve and index its contents, you want to make sure that it can find all of your pages.  You also want to make sure that the external/off-site pages that you are linking to also exist.   Broken links reflect badly on your site – from both an end-user’s and search engine’s perspective.   You lose some quality points from both camps when a link does not get to the correct destination (i.e. it is broken).

One of the simplest ways to eliminate any snags in this area is to generate a “broken links report”. This usually involves a software program that simulates a search engine spider and crawls your site looking at the links and then checking to make sure that the pages that you are linking to actually exist.  It will then provide you with a list of any issues that require your attention so that you can pass it on to your web developer and get them resolved asap.

This is a basic, yet essential step in the “quality assessment” of web sites here at Vertical Leap.  In fact, our servers automatically check and recheck our client’s websites regularly to eliminate this potential issue.  

As we had this technology in-house for some time, we thought we’d share it and so have released a free broken links reporting tool on our web site today.   Give it a test drive when you get a chance – I hope you find it useful.