This week we are announcing a new tool each day (so stay tuned by subscribing). Today’s new tool is the “Dead Link Checker” tool. Many of you have probably seen Google’s tool (inside Google Webmaster Central) that reports pages on your site that can’t be found in their crawl. Although this is helpful, it falls short. SoloSEO’s Dead Link Check tool will go through each page of your sitemap and check each internal and outbound link to make sure the content exists (and does not give a 404 error, etc).
Why is the Dead Link Check tool important for SEO?
1) Search engines don’t like dead links. It makes your site appear like it is not being updated, that it is not fresh. If a search engines considers your site outdated, this is more than likely going to reflect in your rankings against more “fresh” and updated competitors.
2) People hate dead links. It drives me nuts when I find a page that links somewhere, internal or external, but then I’m at a dead end because it’s a bad link. This quickly turns me off and points me directly to the back button. And if people hate them, then you can bet search engines will consider this in their algorithms.
3) Dead links are hard to find. I was surprised during the testing stage of this tool to find 2 dead links of my own on one of my sites. I would have had no clue that I had (1) mistyped a URL and (2) was linking to a page that did not exist any longer. Even if you have just 20 or 30 pages of content, going through each link is going to take you forever. Do you have dead links? Only one (easy) way to know…
You can use the Dead Link Checker tool even if you are in a free trial. The tool takes only 1 second to initiate, because all you have to do is click a button to tell SoloSEO to initiate the tool. It runs in the background, and will send you a nice email when its finished for your convenience.
Check back tomorrow for another new SEO tool in SoloSEO!
