Fixing Bulk Crawl Errors Using a Redirection Plugin in WordPress

I’ve already written several posts about how to find and fix broken internal links in WordPress.

But what if you also want to fix your crawl errors?

If you take a look at your Google Webmaster Tools account and notice hundreds or thousands of crawl errors, you’ll want to fix them.

If you don’t, expect to suffer a penalty from Google.

1,274 crawl errors will get you penalized because it creates a poor user experience for your site visitors.

Redirecting Broken Links

There’s different ways to redirect broken links to the correct location or content which is related.

Use the redirection feature in your web hosts cPanel account
Create the redirects in a .htaccess file on your server
Create the redirects in your WordPress admin panel

The second option is the most efficient and produces minimal http requests and load on your database and server.

If you don’t understand how to use .htaccess file code then i have an excellent solution.

Redirection Plugin

This plugin allows you to create redirects in the backend of your WordPress Dashboard.

This way you can manage them from your admin panel without logging into your cPanel account or editing the .htaccess file on your server.

Modules

There’s 3 modules to choose from when creating redirects using this plugin. Basically this means you can handle your redirects using 3 different methods as mentioned at the start of this post.

The Apache Module enables you to create redirects in WordPress which then writes them to your .htaccess file on your Apache server. As mentioned earlier, this is the most efficient way to use redirects.

This module should be automatically created after you install and activate the plugin.

Groups

You can use one of the default groups or create multiple groups to manage your redirection’s. I simply create a group named 404 redirects htaccess and added all the redirects into the one group.

You’ll find a default group will be setup automatically when you take a look at the plugin settings.

Options

Another big advantage of using this plugin is the ability to upload a csv file of all your broken links.

You can easily download this file from your Google Webmaster Tools account.

You can then upload the file of your crawl errors using the plugins import feature in the options screen.

Redirecting The Crawl Errors

This needs to be done manually.

One method i used was to simply paste the words from the broken link into Google custom search to find the right permalink or something as close as possible.

Newer Solutions

Plugin To Search Find & Replace Broken Links in WordPress