All of us who manage one or more websites insert links, internal and external, in the articles we write and publish. Over time some of these links are broken, no longer exist or have changed the address (URL). If we don’t want to lose visitors and search engine rankings, we should try to remove or fix those broken links. With this we will achieve a good SEO .
How can we detect those links? It is clear that if we have a site with hundreds or thousands of articles, we cannot do a review by hand, we must resort to a tool that helps us find broken links.
In WordPress, the most widely used content manager, there are some plugins designed for this purpose, standing out in the Broken Link Checker list . It is a plugin that, according to some experts, consumes a lot of resources, so they do not recommend its use. In addition, at the moment, it has not been updated for six months.
use an app
What we cannot disdain is using a tool that takes care of checking our website in order to show, among other things, 404 errors, those that arise due to broken links in articles. These tools or applications must be installed on the computer. In this article we are going to refer to Integrity , which can be installed on Mac computers.
After downloading and installing the application on the computer, we must run it, and do the following:
- In the Settings tab we must indicate the options. The best thing, in principle, is to leave the ones that come by default.
- In the same tab we must write the URL of the main page of the website in Starting URL and click on the Go button in the upper right part.
- We wait for the analysis process to finish. When finished we can see the results. To do this we must click on the By Status button . Something similar to the following will be displayed:
- On the left side, all the results are shown, grouped into different sections. The one that interests us at the moment is the titled 404 not found . If we click on it, if it appears, a list with all the links will open.
- Click on the first of the links in the list. A pop-up window will open showing information about the broken link. Something similar to the following:
- In the case that we show, we see that the website to which the link points makes a redirection, so no correction is necessary. Although the usual thing is to open the page of our site, marking it on the previous screen and clicking on the Visit button .
- We locate the link with the text that appears in Link text and modify it.
Access
To get this application you have to access Integrity . There is a free version, valid for most users, and a paid version, which offers added value. As we have already indicated, it is an application for Mac computers. It works without problems in the latest versions of macOS.
