During the existence of the site, sooner or later such a problem as broken links will appear on it. They lead to a page, image, file, or other site that no longer exists. What is their danger, how to check them, how often to do it? Read about it in our article.
Reasons for education
Broken links appear on websites for various reasons.
Basic is the complete removal of a file or page from the network or from your site. If the page is no longer relevant or the image has been removed from the database, the link to it will become invalid.
The address of the page itself changes a little less often, for example, due to the renaming of a material or site. The link in this case may also cease to be valid.
Well, the most banal reason is a common mistake when writing url. This happens if a person prescribes them manually or copies them incompletely. Therefore, it is very important to check all links immediately after adding them.
Why you need to control it
Danger of broken linksin that, without receiving the necessary information, the visitor will simply leave the site. As a result, the behavioral factor will worsen, as will the position of the site in search engines. In general, the progress of the project will be significantly more difficult. Therefore, checking broken links is an important part of site administration.
Manual Remedy
You can work with broken links without software tools. If your site is small, then it will be enough for you to go through the pages and check all the hyperlinks for their performance. If you are careful and do not miss any, then this method will be the most reliable. It will allow you to accurately determine whether links are available to ordinary users.
But this method has a significant drawback. It can take several hours, and on a large project it will not work at all, since you are guaranteed to miss some links or even entire sections. Therefore, it is better to use hardware.
Online Services
If you don't want to install anything on your computer, then you can use the service of checking broken links on the Internet. There are many such sites, it is enough to indicate the address of your project on them, so that the service gives you all the broken links and their location. These services include Broken Link Checker, Usabilla, Free Link Checker and others. Checking broken links online is quite convenient. The services are easy to use, but their functionality is often very limited.
Checking brokenlinks on Wordpress sites
If you are the owner of a site running Wordpress, then it will not be difficult for you to control broken links. Checking a Wordpress site for broken links can be done using plugins installed on the resource. For example, such a plugin is Broken Link Checker.
To work with it, go along the path "Parameters - Check links - Advanced". In the window that appears, the option "Check all pages" will be available. If you click on it, the plugin will start working automatically, you just have to wait until the operation is completed. Then broken links will appear in the General window, you only need to analyze them and fix them.
Most of these plugins allow you not only to quickly search, but also immediately replace broken links, and, if necessary, delete them. The only drawback of such services is that they require a lot of resources, which can slow down the site significantly. Therefore, they should be used with caution.
Checking with Yandex and Google
If you use Yandex. Webmaster, you can find broken links using the tools of this service. You can do this in the "Site indexing" menu, in the "Excluded pages" section, in the "HTTP status: Resource not found (404)" item. All invalid links with this error will appear in the window. It will also show on which pages they are placed. Directly from the webmaster, you can follow the links andfix them.
The same can be done in Google Webmaster under "Status/Crawl Errors".
Unfortunately, these services do not find all broken links, and it is not very convenient to work with them.
Programs on the computer to check
Errors can be checked not only online, but also with the help of special programs. The most popular broken link checker is Xenu Link Sleuth. It has been abandoned by developers and has not been updated for a very long time, but it copes with its tasks perfectly.
Instructions for working with Xenu
If you need to check your site for broken links, Xenu will do it very well.
There is no need to set up the program specially. Simply open the File menu and select the Check Url item, or simply click on the blank sheet icon on the toolbar. In the window that opens, insert a link to the main page of your site.
All website URLs will be sorted. At the top of the list there will be broken links, highlighted in red, and at the bottom - working ones, marked in green. Sometimes links leading to service pages are marked in red. You can ignore them. And the rest will need to work separately.
To get the most complete information about a broken link, right-click on it and select Url properties. The window that opens will show the title of the link, as well as the pages on which it is used.
If checking broken links using Xenu, then keep in mind that itcan sometimes be wrong. If the program does not wait for a response from the url, it will mark it as broken with the no connection status. Such links are placed at the very top when sorting, they will need to be checked manually.
You will have to manually delete and change the found broken links. There are no services or programs for such purposes, especially since this is simply impossible - you will definitely need to enter the links yourself.
What's nice is that Xenu is free. True, in case of errors, there will be no one to turn to.
Working with Linkoskop
Linkoscop program allows you to evaluate internal linking. It performs many functions, including checking where all the links on the site lead, that is, it does what we need. This program is paid, it costs 450 rubles for a license for five years. You can use it for free for three days. Some people report that Linkoscop does a worse job of finding broken links than Xenu. Often she does not find them at all, or identifies only a small number.
Which control method should I choose
Each of the above methods has its advantages and disadvantages, so you need to use them in different cases.
The manual method is suitable for owners of small sites with a small number of pages. The method is quite reliable and allows you to 100% detect broken links, but it requires a lot of painstaking work.
Online verification is a convenient and compact option that does not take up space on your computer and is suitable forcheck the site anywhere, not just on your home PC.
Checking a site for broken links with programs is a less mobile, but very reliable method. In addition, the programs have some additional features to help you better customize your site.
Checking with plugins is the most convenient way for those who have sites on CMS Wordpress.
How often to check
If you regularly update information on the site and constantly add new links, then you should definitely check them. It is also very important to control broken links if your site has been around for a long time. Some of them, especially external ones, may become outdated.
Broken links should be checked about once a month. You don't need to do this more often, and with more rare checks, you can lose a significant part of the project's visitors. By the way, to save website resources on Wordpresse, you can install the Broken Link Checker plugin once every 30 days, only for the duration of the check. If the plugin is permanently installed, it will unnecessarily load the site.
Check for broken links 1C
Broken links can occur not only on sites, but also in the 1C system. If the infobase is damaged, then some objects may be lost, then links to them get the form 77:805f000c291e652311e0ad237dea6181).
Broken links in 1C arise for the following reasons:
- due to the actions of users who have the right to delete or flag for deletion of objects without referential integrity control(it is important to close such opportunities);
- due to the use of processing that deletes objects incorrectly;
- due to the exchange between different bases.
If you need to check broken links 1C 8.2, it can be done during testing, if you check the box "Check the referential integrity of the infobase". Here you can immediately clear these links, however, the original state of the database will not be returned, so the changes made to it will be lost from accounting.
If you have a fresh database backup, you can try to restore the links. To date, there are many treatments and codes for 1C programmers. They work in different ways, but they all do the same job. It is important that the processing is checked by an experienced programmer and determined that it does not contain errors and will not harm the account base even more.
Conclusion
Removing broken links both on sites and in the 1C program is a very important task that should never be neglected. Then your sites and databases will be relevant and understandable for users.
