Broken links Remover wordpress plugin
Broken links Remover wordpress plugin helps you fix bad/broken links, both text links(anchor tags) and image links (img tags).It blocks the display of such links on your wordpress post/page, until you fix them. These are not made visible to search engine robots as well, until you correct them.
Update:
Version 1.2 of Broken links remover wordpress plugin has been released. Read the detailed FAQ here.Before that, read this post to get to know about this plugin.
Links are very commonly used in posts/pages. Quite often, these links may get broken when a page, that the link represents, is deleted or when a site to which you have linked has moved to a different domain or when a subdirectory is forgotten or for any other reasons including a typo.
Broken links, on your site, are bad for your readers as well as the search engine crawlers.Do you know Why?
Broken links are bad for your readers – Why?
Your readers will get annoyed when they click a link that leads them to a “404 Not found” error page or they get redirected to some other website or page.The redirection could even be the result of an hacker.But you definitely might not have intended to take your readers to an hacker’s site/page.
You are thus helping your readers and other website owners by not linking to posts/pages that redirect.This can achieved only through Broken links remover plugin.If the site owner had infact permanently moved the page to a new location, then your dashboard displays a 301 status for that link.You can then fix it, by directly linking to the final destination page.Thus Broken links remover can help purify the web for both readers and search engines.
Broken links are bad for search engine robots – Why?
Broken links are also a very bad sign to search engine robots. The search engines crawlers use the links on a website’s pages, to find other web pages on your site and other external sites. This is essentially how the the search engines crawlers find new web pages on websites. However, if they can not follow a link to find the content, then your search engine rankings will more than likely be negatively affected in search engine result pages.
Broken links can degrade your rankings on a site wide basis. Search engines rank individual pages and not whole sites, but there are a few site wide ranking factors. Bad/Broken links is definitely one of those factors.
Thus both human readers and search engines do not like finding a broken/bad link.
How does Broken links remover work?
Whenever a human reader or a search engine robot requests a post/page on your website, Broken links remover wordpress plugin checks the status of all links on that post/page.If any of the link/links is/are bad/broken, Broken links remover wordpress plugin logs the information about them and replaces the link with just the anchor text.
Thus neither the human reader nor the search engine robot get to see the broken/bad links.But you can view the details of all such bad/broken links under “Manage–>”Bad Links” of your wordpress administration.You can fix the bad/broken links by directly going to the edit panel of your post/page from the dashboard, by clicking on the “Post ID”.After fixing the bad/broken links, you may delete them from this dashboard.
How is Broken links remover different from several broken link checker tools available on the web?
- Broken links remover does not scan through all your posts/pages in the background.It works as and when the requestor (human reader or search engine robot) requests a post/page on your wordpress site.However, once a link has been detected as bad/broken, Broken links remover plugin does not check the link’s status again, until you fix it.
- Broken links remover plugin not only alerts you of bad/broken links through dashboards but it also removes(hides) those links from the requestor’s view
Broken links remover can either use CURL or PHP’s native socket functionalities (FSOCKOPEN) to detect link’s status, as some hosts disable the use of FSOCKOPEN or CURL.
While Platinum SEO Plugin helps you automate the onsite SEO (search engine optimization) process, Broken links Remover Wordpress Plugin complements it by automatically removing/hiding all bad/broken links on your website, until you fix them.
Broken links Remover wordpress plugin is great to use with caching plugins:
Broken links Remover wordpress plugin is great to use with caching plugins.Why? Caching plugins retrieve post/page information from the Mysql database only once during the cache expiry period that you have configured (in your caching plugin settings).Subsequent requests for that post/page are served from cache.these are static HTML pages and none of the server side code(PHP) gets executed.So broken links remover will also verify links’ status only once during that period and this automatically optimizes this plugin.
How to install Broken links Remover Wordpress Plugin?
- 1. Unzip into your `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. If you’re uploading it make sure to upload the top-level folder. Don’t just upload all the php files and put them in `/wp-content/plugins/`.
- 2. Activate the Broken links Remover plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- 3. Visit your options (*Options – Broken Links Remover*) for Wordpress 2.3.x, (*Settings – Broken Links Remover*) for Wordpress 2.5.x
- 4. Set the options.If you need help on them, click on the option titles
That’s all folks!
Download:
Download Broken links Remover Plugin from wordpress repository, install and let me know your feedback.
Donation:
If you love this plugin, I would request each one of you to donate atleast 2 dollars towards support expenses. This would also motivate me to enhance this further and make other good plugins for the wordpress community.A part of this amount will also be used towards education expenses for the deprived children in third world countries.If you do love to contribute more towards this noble cause, contact me through Contact page. I will send you the details and how this money is intended to be spent.
Filed under: Wordpress SEO & Plugins
Ricky, I have placed a new paypal button here.It should work.Not sure why the encrypted one does not work.will have to check with paypal.Thanks for informing me.
I would also request you to do a fresh install of broken links remover plugin from repository.This is the official version 1.0, available as download for all.To reinstall, you just need to replace the existing plugin’s php file with the one that you download from the repository.It would be better if you do this as all enhancements would be worked upon this file and a newer version released.Just to ensure that every plugin user is in sync.
Wordpress prompted me to update from the repository all by itself, you’ll be pleased to know! Also, thanks for the new button.
I just realised something with the management interface – I had confused the meaning of the “Hide 301/2 redirects” and similar switches. I wanted to hide them from the error log but when I switched those settings on those links were hidden from users and it took me a few days to realise
. I suspect the slightly longer wording of “Hide … from users” and “Hide … from logfile” would be easier for us.
Ricky, The options are explained in the settings page.click on the header of the option and you will find the explanation.
[...] Broken Links Remover checks every links in posts and hides them if they are broken (ie leading to 404 or other unexpected results) About the “what”: having dead links in posts is both inevitable and something I don’t care. Some posts on this blog are 4 years old so I don’t mind if something completely outdated points to something missing. A broken link in a fresh post is something I’ll probably find out by myself fast. (And I really don’t think broken outgoing links have any impact on SEO) About the “how”: if I understood things correctly, for every link in every post that is displayed, the plugin adds one extra DB query and maybe one remote HTTP request. That is totally overkill. My way to warn about broken links would be to check at publish time, and add something like an ugly popup over the “Write” screen telling that, dude, you’ve link to 404s, wtf. But definitely not at render time, especially on old outdated forgotten posts. [...]
[...] Broken links Remover plugin has a newer version – 1.2 and you are going to love this version.This version of Broken links Remover plugin provides a variety of options and you would definitely need a detailed FAQ. Here it goes. [...]
hi. Thanks for plugin
perfect.
Regards
[...] Broken links Remover wordpress plugin | WordPress & Plugins (tags: wordpress plugin) [...]
Hi i have a question about this plugin. i recently moved my blog from wordpress.com to a self hosting server and now when ill check the google webmaster tool my site has 4037 “not found” links. when i installed the plugin it starts to find a lot of bad links (under the bad link option) if i choose to delete them with the plugin, does it fix the problem? does the plugin then removes those links that it didnt find?
Best regards from Sweden
No no no…It does not fix the problem…neither it removes the links..
you will have to read the detailed FAQ
This looks incredibly useful, especially as my blog grows and gains a backlog of posts referencing pages that may or may not still exist.
Who has time to regularly check old posts for broken links? This takes care of all those worries. I’ll be putting this to good use. Thanks a lot!