The first question you should be asking yourselves is what are broken links? Well, broken links are the dead links which aren’t doing their job and that’s why the user ends on a 404 error page. Broken links are bad for your website as they affect the whole user experience, but on top of that they affect your blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Therefore it’s very important to learn how to Track Broken Links with Google Webmaster Tool and then fix them. Because you don’t want the visitor to go away because of the 404 error page which you couldn’t keep track of. Moreover, they harm the user experience and results in losing customers, therefore broken links must be fixed timely.
How to Track Broken Links with Google Webmaster Tool
First of all, you have to signup for Google Webmaster Tool using your Gmail username and password. Once you are logged in, you will see the welcome screen like this:
Next what you to do is add your website in the box showing https://www.example.com/ and click on Add a property. Google will ask you to verify the ownership of the domain which you are trying to add inside Google Search Console, with a list of different methods which you can choose for verification purpose. Select any method in which you are comfortable and complete the verification process.
Once you have completed the verification, just submit the sitemap of your website, go to Crawl > Sitemaps and click the ADD/TEST SITEMAP button from there add your sitemap. Once Googles verify that your sitemap is correct it will start indexing your website and if it finds any broken links it will keep you inform. You check about the broken URLs by going to Crawl > Crawl Errors which will list all the broken links.
Once you have identified the broken and fixed it using WordPress link checker plugin you can select the link and click on mark as fixed to remove the error from your Google Webmaster Tool console. I hope this article was helpful and you have learned how to Track Broken Links with Google Webmaster Tool successfully. If you still have any queries regarding this post feel free to ask them in comments. Have any more ideas or methods to track Broken Links in WordPress? Suggestions are appreciated and are updated in the post.
