One of the things I recommend you do once or twice a year is to run an audit of your blog. The purpose of this audit is to fix errors in your blog such as links to pages not found.
If a visitor comes to your site and due to a missing link can’t find the information they need, then you’re missing out on valuable traffic. Thankfully there are some easy tools out there to track such errors.
One of the tools I’ve used for a long time is Google Webmaster Tools. I wrote a review of this a few months ago. The service it provides is free too.
One of the features offered by Google Webmaster Tools is an analysis of any errors encountered by Google whilst indexing your web site. The Google Webmaster Help Center page provides more information on what this indexing process involves.
The more Google knows about your web site structure, the greater chance there is of increased traffic being driven to your site. It is therefore a good idea to track down and fix broken links.
Under the Diagnostic tab of Google Webmaster Tools you will find a report of any errors reported by Google whilst indexing your site. The web crawl page splits any errors into several categories, such as pages not found or unreachable. The ultimate goal is to have a screen looking like this. This image shows zero errors for each category.
The categories I focus on are “Not Found” and “Unreachable URLs”. Any errors in these categories indicates a possible broken link somewhere on your web site. I use the word ‘possible’ because there are other reasons that Google may not have found the page it was looking for, such as your web site being down or the network on your web host timing out.
If you see any errors here then you can click on the appropriate link to see a detailed list of web pages where errors occurred. The Google web crawl errors page goes into this subject in more detail if you’re interested.
For months this Diagnostic page would regularly show errors for my web site. Recently I changed the theme on this site and fixed a few errors in some of my WordPress template files and that seems to have made a big difference. Since making these changes several older articles on this site are now performing very well in search engine rankings. In some cases I’ve seen spectacular increases in traffic.
This increase in traffic may just be coincidence, or it could be that Google is now able to index these older articles. Either way, it is worth keeping an eye on this type of information. You could add it to a list of regular web site housekeeping tasks that you perform once or twice the year.
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13 responses so far ↓
1 Edward Dowd // Aug 16, 2007 at 9:55 pm
There is a firefox extension I think its called web developer toolbar that allows you to change links, and even validate your site
2 gmttzy // Aug 17, 2007 at 12:23 am
visiting & reading…
3 Dean // Aug 17, 2007 at 7:21 am
The Web Developer Toolbar is a great Firefox extension. One of my favourites.
Another one I’m currently using is Firebug. If you want to monitor information like CSS, HTML and Javascript it is well worth checking out.
4 113 Must Read Blogging Tips // Aug 19, 2007 at 2:10 am
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6 Paolo Amoroso // Aug 19, 2007 at 6:46 pm
Report broken links also in *other people’s* blogs. That’s how I got the first couple of high quality readers after starting my own blog.
They were blogs I researched before starting mine. I noticed the broken links or spam comments there, and just sent the owners very short notes via email reporting those problems — you do provide your readers with ways of contacting you, right?
I didn’t tell about my blog, which was mentioned only in the signature. In both cases I got back thanking messages for the links, also mentioning how interesting my blog looked.
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9 Lalit Nagrath // Aug 28, 2007 at 1:51 pm
thanks for reminding abut it
if you put links from other websites \blogs , it s necessary to check the backlinks , else ppl will notice that nd can Result a decrease in visitors interest (for that particular article )
10 Blogging Tipps die Du unbedingt lesen solltest » Allgemein // Aug 31, 2007 at 2:16 pm
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11 Bhanu // Nov 2, 2007 at 8:57 pm
about 50 pages webmaster says that URLs restricted by robots.txt, is there any remedy??
12 Dean // Nov 4, 2007 at 7:10 pm
You need to examine your robots.txt file.
This error normally means that Google was unable to crawl certain pages of your website due to entries in your robots.txt file.
This link may be able to help you further:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35235
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