Conducting a Backlink Audit for Your WordPress Site
By merely building a website, your issues won’t get resolved. In order for the website to add value to your business, there are several things to do even after creating an online presence. Auditing your broken links is one of the tasks, which should be performed consistently. Broken links can invite Google SEO penalties for your WordPress site for various reasons.
Primarily, it can be very frustrating for your visitors if they click on something and the site then directs them to a broken link. As a result, the visitors won’t be able to access the information they wanted, and this might discourage them from visiting your site again. So, you will lose some potential clients in the process. These links, apart from annoying visitors, also leaves a bad impression among robots, especially the crawler bots employed by search engine platforms like Google. This would negatively impact the optimization aspect of your site.
Ways to Find Broken Links on Your WordPress Site
It has become pretty evident that broken links are something your website could do without. The next course of action is to track these backlinks. How do you go about it? These are some of the tried and tested methods and tools that can be employed to access broken links of your WordPress website.
1: Web-Based SEO Audit Tool
By using a web-based SEO audit tool, you will be able to find and fix broken links on a WordPress website. There are many for the same, but two of the very widely used ones are Ahrefs and SEMRush. The two of these have some powerful options and tools to scan your WordPress site for the links and fix them.
2: Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another important tool in dealing with broken links. To get things started, you are required to validate your site with the Google Search Console. After performing this formality, you can enjoy all its features, including the ones pertaining to broken links.
One of the important aspects of the Google Search Console is a Crawl Errors report. This report makes visible all the pages that have shown a 404 error to Google. If you click on these links, a pop-up will surface on which pages linked to the 404 error can be seen, and you can correct broken links as well.
3: Desktop-based Software
Apart from these tools, broken links can also be found using desktop software as well. One of the most desired options on this count is Screaming Frog. This SEO tool is free of cost and can be used to find broken links. Following this, you can utilize the Response Codes option to comb out 404 error pages and afterward make use of the Inlinks feature placed on the downside to know the links to those dysfunctional pages.
4: Broken Link Checker WordPress Plugin
The Broken Link Checker is a free and user-friendly WordPress plugin to find and fix broken links. Through this, you can easily spot all the broken links and find all redirections. The plugin has the capability to go through each and every URL on your WordPress blog and offers a comprehensive report on the broken and redirected links.
Once you find the broken links, what would you do? Now you have to select all of them, and then use the“Unlink” option from the drop-down menu to delink them. It is advisable to go for the updation of links rather than “unlinking” option when it comes to blog posts.
How to Fix Your Link Structure?
After finding each and every defunct backlink, there are procedures to remove those and improve site optimization. Let us briefly go through the procedure over here.
# Create A Request:
To begin with, you have to get all your bad backlinks before you. You have to be really careful about the backlinks from spam sites, paid links, and penalized sites. Now you have made a request for the removal of these links. The request should be made in a polite manner. The request mail should be sent from your company’s registered email instead of a free email service provider.
Don’t use the word “dear” to address the person. Try to get the name of the website owner and personalize the request mail you dispatch. Last but not least, be specific and write in an articulate manner. You should ideally follow these rules while drafting a letter.
# Disavow Irrelevant Backlinks:
In case you find out any irrelevant backlinks belongs to a website, then it is pertinent to opt for disavowal. First, you have to save the links to be disavowed as a .txt file. Then you need to go to Google’s Disavow Links Tool. Over here you are required to either login or create your Google Webmasters account. After this, you need to choose your domain from the drop-down menu. Then simply click on the Disavow key, and upload your .txt file. This way, your bad backlinks will get disavowed.
Conclusion:
So, it is quite clear that your WordPress website should not have any low-quality, broken, or harmful backlinks. If you have such links, then it can hamper your traffic inflow as well as SEO prospects. Hence, it is advisable to regularly conduct a backlink audit for your WordPress site and fix any link issues you find. While you can use the above-mentioned methods and tools to find out and fix broken or toxic links, you can also avail WordPress SEO services from a reputable provider.
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