Have you ever checked your wordpress links to see if any are broken? Incoming and internal links that are broken normally recieve a 404 error message that is not only bad for your search engine ranking but also does not give your site visitors a good experience.
Google wants to create a great experience for its users and will penalize your site and page rank for broken links.
There’s several plugins that easily solve this problem rather than having to fix them one by one manually.
Here’s a free plugin named permalink finder that uses keywords in the broken permalink to redirect your links to a page or post that has those keywords included in the content. This reduces your 404 error messages, increases your traffic and helps avoid a penalty from the search engines.
How Permalink Finder Works
The Permalink Finder Plugin detects when WordPress cannot find a permalink. Before it generates the 404 error it tries to locate any posts with similar words. It does this by searching through the database trying to find any of the word values from the bad link. It takes the best match and then, rather than issuing a 404 error it sends back a redirect to the correct page.
Users will see the page that they are looking for, and search engine spiders will see the 301 redirect and update their databases so that the page appears correctly in searches.
Fixing Links After Moving From Blogger
This is especially useful where WordPress removes words like “the” and “a” from the permalink during conversions from Blogger accounts. It is also useful for migrations that formerly used extensions such as html and shtml, when WordPress does not.
The search of the database requires a small amount of extra overhead, but it only occurs when WordPress cannot find the original post and resorts to using this plugin, which should be rare, especially after the search engines fix up their own indexes.
The configuration panel allows a user to select how the plugin finds a missing page. The plugin counts the number of words that match to a post. By default, a two word match is sufficient to cause a redirect to the found page.
False positives are possible, especially if the user selects a one word match. Increasing the number of words, however makes it unlikely that the plugin will ever find a match.
Optionally, the plugin will redirect hits on index.html, index.htm, and index.shtml to the blog home page. This is useful when a website previously used a non-php home page.
The plugin will also optionally keep track of the last few 404?s or redirects. This is useful to find out what pages are missing or named badly that keep causing 404 errors or forcing redirects. I have also made a video explaining more about fixing WordPress links .
Note: The permalink structure on your blog must be set to include postname. This plugin is only for use with postname permalink structures
Did you fix your broken wordpress links? Its important that you fix these errors so try using google webmaster tools or another wordpress link plugin called broken link checker to find out what links are broken and easily fix them using this simple wordpress permalink finder plugin.
Brad Dalton
@wpsitesdotnet
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