I was looking at my Google Webmaster Tools account a while back for my blog, and I had an awful number of crawl errors, also known as 404 errors, where there is a file not found on a site.
In my defense, my blog was started in 2004 and I’ve used multiple platforms over the year, which resulted in many directory setups, file extensions, etc.
At the end of last month, I had over 900 crawl errors on my blog, and I set up a reminder to tackle them. But I have been putting it off for weeks, because it doesn’t look like a particularly fun project.
Then it finally struck me this past weekend – I have to fix this stuff ASAP. I’m voluntarily giving a lousy experience all over the place to my site visitors.
So I figured I’d make it a point to knock out 10 a day until I was done.
I’ve been going through one at a time with the Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools, and creating redirects to fix them with the a redirection plugin.
As I fix and test them, I click “Mark as Fixed” for each error link and make that list smaller.
I’ve been doing more than 10 on a lot of days, and now I’m down to 548 bad links. I think I’ll knock this out by the end of the month.
How about your links – are they all working OK?