Let's talk about broken links.

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Here is your host, Dave Jackson.

Quick Housekeeping Tip I mentioned in the previous episodes we are going to be rebranding this show.

It's going to be called podcast website tips in the future.

So when you see the artwork change, you'll know what's going on.

Today we're going to talk about dealing with broken links.

I've been podcasting for almost 20 years and when I look at the School of podcasting, one of the things I really need to kind of put up the priority level here is broken links.

Why?

Because a lot of the people I talked to 20 years ago are no longer in business.

And so why is this a big deal?

Well, first of all, it's frustrating because when people either a search for your site or they're on your site and you've done the good job of trying to create SEO by linking to past episodes and somebody clicks on it and yeah, they get a lovely 404 message.

So that's not going to work.

And then what that does is it kind of beats up your brand and you kind of get perceived as, oh, well, this guy must not be maintaining his website.

She's no good.

And this is bad quality, whatever it is.

And we talked about bounce rates a couple episodes ago.

Yeah, this can increase your bounce rate because they land on your site, they click on a page they want to go to, it's a 404 and they bounce.

So that's not good.

So from a visitor standpoint, it's not a good thing to have and then it also can impact your SEO.

So in the same way that a person who's on your website that clicks on a link and goes, oh, well, that's dead.

Yeah, same thing is going to happen to some sort of web crawler from Google or Bing or whoever.

And so when that search engine follows that link, yeah, they're just not going to be happy about it and it's going to create what they call crawl errors and it prevents the crawler from accessing and indexing that page.

Now, again, that's going to decrease what's called your link equity.

And so internal links we mentioned help distribute authority throughout a website.

But if an internal link points to a broken page and potentially, you know, link equity that could have been passed on is lost.

So this crawler is coming through your website and it could be, you know, spreading all this lovely SEO goodness and then it hits a dead link.

That's no good.

And so consequently it can lower your search engine links.

Now, if you google the phrase free link checker, there are a ton of these.

I found a site called site Checker Pro and I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to click on that.

And most of these, there are like all the big boys hrefs, you know, all the things like that.

They have these tools and it can take a while for this to really actually go through your entire site.

If you have a lot of pages, it's going to take a bit.

But I used this one and was somewhat horrified at the number of broken links on my website.

And again, most of these are companies and podcasters that don't exist anymore.

But it was a little disheartening when I have 690 pages and 297 critical things I need to look at.

It also says, I have 1400 things that are warnings, I have 1000 opportunities.

But it does, you know, again, the way this worked is I went over, they gave me a 14 day trial and it's giving me a good overall view of what's going on with the site.

But I was really just looking for broken links.

And the thing I love about it is if you log into your website, like in my case, this site is on WordPress, but you could easily go in and it gives you a link to that page.

And so you could go there and edit it and then fix the broken link and you are good to go.

So again, I'll have a link to that free tool.

And really free means you have a 14 day trial and you can see what you can see.

Maybe hopefully you won't be as disenfearn as I was.

Again, keep in mind the podcast is going to rebrand here very shortly.

I'm thinking probably by the end of October and the new show's name will be podcast website tips.

The artwork will change to say podcast website tips.

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