When was the last time you checked for broken site links?

For me, it has been years.

I don’t really deleted much content (personally or professionally) so I assume everything is fine. Well, related to an issue I was troubleshooting last time, I stumbled upon a dead link. Bummer. I figured if there was one, there might be more. So I took the top search result I found related to site link checkers and went over to www.brokenlinkcheck.com. They have a nice – FREE – option to crawl a site and report any broken links found.

Guess what -? I had 117 broken links on the site! I had no idea and never would have guessed there were that many. Quite a few of them were external links that I’ve referenced in different articles in the past (some of these articles QUITE old [I’m talking 10+ years old]).

Because, as noted above, I don’t remove much content, there were a lot of old posts – still valid and useful in their content – that referenced other sources that just didn’t exist anymore, or the pages were moved.

There were also a number of internal links that were broken – due to renaming or relocating of content.

So, now I’m in clean-up mode. I’ve corrected 47 of the broken link issues and will continue to work through the list over the next few days.

Perhaps you should run a scan on your own site and check for broken links? You might be surprised.