Finding Broken Back Links

[vcasebourne]

Hello there

I am new here but really want to mend my broken website by myself as I enjoy a challenge!

I used to have great rankings but have moved websites a few times (same domain) and the last move was to wordpress. I now have loads of broken links in the SERPS and wondered if there was an easy way to flush google of them as they are getting lots of 404 errors? They really are too many to do a 301 on (I have done the main pages)

Also how do I do a crawl of my website for any internal broken links? Does SEOmoz have something or is there an external program you would recommend?

Thanks

Victoria

[JonathanRolande]

I would second the Screaming Frog tool, just used that yesterday and it's great! Might even buy a licence for it now. The free versions great though.

[madegood]

As far as i'm aware google doesn't have a maximum amount of 301's for a website, or, it won't penalise you for having too many. Make sure you keep an up to date sitemap submitted to google. I use Yoast SEO for that

Broken Link Checker is a good plugin to manage broken links from within your site. You can manage them all from a dashboard within wordpress so you don't have to visit each page individually.

Hope that helps.

[TomRayner]

Hi Victoria

Seeing as you're now on Wordpress, there's a couple of plugins you may find useful.

First is Link Juice Keeper - this will redirect any 404s that are caused by any external sites linking to you. The links are redirected to the root domain to ensure any strength is passed.

Another is Broken Link Checker - as you may have guessed, this will notify you if you have any internal broken links.

Link Juice Keeper might sound appealing, but I don't think you can redirect certain pages to specific locations, I think it all just goes to the root domain (but I could be wrong).

Screaming Frog is another great tool that would let you find broken links.

Hope these help