If you only ever write about your thoughts, and what is happening in your life, the following plugin may not be of much use to you. However, a lot of bloggers write articles that involve linking to other sites. Over time, those sites may shut down, or change their structure. Most web admins will not have the time or knowledge to automatically redirect people using an old address to the new location of a page.
This is where the Broken Link Checker can help you out. It will trawl through all your posts, and any time it finds a link that no longer works, it will alert you. You can then either update the link, remove it or simply leave it struck out, which is the default formatting applied to bad links that it finds. Say you are talking about the latest great deal on a console you have found, and then six months later the online shop changes the categories around, you will know that you need to either link to an alternative supplier, or try and re-find the supplement on the original site.
New links are checked very quickly, and you can tell the plugin how often old, previously checked links should be re-checked. You can decide whether to check the results from within WordPress’s admin area, or if you prefer you can be e-mailed each time a link is found to be broken. Obviously checking links will use your server’s processing time, and if you use a shared host, with a lot of links on your site, you may need to use the plug-in’s settings to control how much processing time is used.
Sep 22 2010
Broken Link Checker
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