How To Find and Redirect Broken Links In Blogger and website

I personally really liked the Page Redirect option among the latest search preferences by blogger. It lets you easily redirect or cloak  deleted, missing, non-existing or removed posts in your BlogSpot blogs to an existing location. Normally for pages that are not found, blogger automatically displays the 404 Error page but this can harm your PageRank from internal and external links. Suppose you had a post and people started giving it backlinks and it got circulated everywhere, if for some reasons you decided to delete that post, people and robots will see a URL error i.e Page Not Found error. All that PageRank juice which was pointing this specific page will be lost therefore you must learn how to redirect missing pages in blogger both for redirecting PageRank juice and also for making your blog more search engine friendly because this is the only way to reduce the number of crawl errors you see at your Google Webmaster Account. We will be dealing this tutorial in a detailed manner to make best possible use of Custom Redirection.

What are Broken Links?

In layman terms any page or post that you delete in your blog or website is termed as a broken link by search robots. Its called broken because the link points to a missing content and displays a 404 error page.

How To Find Broken Links?

Sometimes you don't remember which posts were deleted by you or which URLs are causing crawl errors and making it difficult for search spiders to index your blog more smoothly. To find broken links in your blog no matter you are running a Google blog or Wordpress or any website, the method below applies to all:

1. Go To Google Webmasters Account


2. Select your blog


3. Click the link under crawl errors

4.   Next click on Not Found



If you are running a blogger blog then you will observe several missing/broken URLs list , this is because most of your dynamic pages like comment page and search pages needs to be removed from search indexing using your webmaster account and if you see too many errors then do not panic, it wont effect your blog SEO too much but removing errors is always good than letting the error list grow. I will discuss the techy part of it in some other tutorial for this post we will keep our focus on deleted posts links only.

Now carefully look at the URL errors and note down the post links that you come across. In my case I had deleted a post I once wrote on Feedburner and also one on HostGator Plans that I deleted due to some reasons. The links would look like this in the error list:



 

Since people were linking back these two posts therefore I had to redirect them to homepage so that I keep receiving the PageRank juice and keep Blog indexing by robots smooth. Anyone who would click this links would see a 404 error page instead. So what we did was redirecting both these pages to Blog homepage. The procedure is defined in next step.

Redirect Broken Links

It is always wise to redirect broken links to homepage or any related page. This will flow the backlinks generous juice instead to homepage  or any page that is related to that deleted post. Lets see how we redirected the two links above.

Redirect to a Related Post:   Redirecting the Hostgator Link

Clicking the hostgator link which is at Priority#5 as shown in the screenshot above opens a new window from where you can copy its full URL



This is the link:

http://www.wrock.org/2012/02/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

The part of link we are interested is the highlighted ending portion.

Now lets learn how to redirect the above broken link to an existing post (related link) which also speaks about HostGator hosting plans and the link for it is:

http://www.wrock.org/2012/01/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

Don't get confused that the above two links seem exactly similar except the month 01 and 02. Its just a coincidence :)

Lets now redirect the link:

1. Go To draft.Blogger.com or just blogger.com if you have upgraded to new interface


2. Then go to Settings > Search preferences


3. Click the edit link next to custom redirects


4. Inside the FROM box I would insert the broken link


5. and Inside the TO Box I will insert the link for an existing link to which we want to redirect the missing/broken link

6.   Click the Save link followed by the Save Changes button

7.   The link in now successfully redirected to an existing post.