How To Find and Redirect Broken Links In Blogger?

redirect broken links in bloggerI 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.

Note: The custom redirect limit is 10 links/URLS for each BlogSpot blog. You can not redirect more than 10 links or pages for the time being. Therefore redirect only important pages.

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

blogger crawl errors

     4.   Next click on Not Found

image

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:

blogger url errors

 

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

page not found

This is the link:

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/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.mybloggertricks.com/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

redirect broken links blogger

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

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

If you click the broken link below, it will take you straight to the new related post.

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/02/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html

 

Redirect To HomePage:  Redirect the Feedburner link

Since I had no related post for feedburner so I redirected it to my homepage and this is what I recommend to you all. Redirect to related posts only if you have any else simply redirect all broken links to homepage.

The procedure is same except for the TO box. I need to redirect the feedburner link from this:

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2011/06/hack-feedburner-count-postscomments-of.html

To homepage link

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/

See the screen shot:

redirect posts in blogger

Notice that inside the FROM box I inserted the ending portion for broken link and inside the TO box I simply inserted a forward slash i.e. (/)

Click save and all done!

Now click the following link and you will find yourself redirected to MBT Main Homepage.

http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2011/06/hack-feedburner-count-postscomments-of.html

 

Need Help?

I just hope this demonstrative tutorial may prove helpful and locating and redirecting missing links in your blog. The method will redirect all links in your blog no matter how many times they are interlinked thus not saving both PageRank and traffic from external links that point to you. Without the above method you will have to manually locate and edit the links which could take months!

It is a new addition in our services apart from 302 redirect services for blogger to wordpress migration that we already offer. I juts hope you find it easy to implement the above method correctly. I use it for the SEO of this blog and our other blogs. Please let me know if you needed any help. Wish you peace and love! :)

If you don't want to get yourself into Serious Technical Trouble while editing your Blog Template then just sit back and relax and let us do the Job for you at a fairly reasonable cost. Submit your order details by Clicking Here »

25 comments

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  1. In blogger new interface have some useful options which is really useful for us.
    Yesterday i was thinking that how to i get my broken links easily, now got the way.Thank you bro for this post.

    http://myfirsttricks.in

    ReplyDelete
  2. hey thanks for such beautiful post..i have almost 3 errors comes like this but these are link are from comments.. for example i comment with url name..i got url which is not accessable but unable to find in my blog to delete it..hope u understand..and one another proble which i was facing is that in my ADD ME ON GOOGLE PLUS widget my picture is not showing..?..THanks

    ReplyDelete
  3. I am not an SEO expert but I think read somewhere recently on google support forum that 404 do not affect pagerank. I just can't find it again as I got it while searching for custom 404 in blogger.

    And removing those 200+ errors one by one is tedious job. Isn't there any way of redirecting all of them at once to your homepage.

    ReplyDelete
  4. <b>hey mohammad bro...ystrday i deleted 30-35 posts frm my blog...but thes posts r still showing in google search results...how to remove them?</b>

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Prince@Hunk

    Don't Worry Brother it will be de-indexed as soon as Search Engine Bots Would Crawl Those Pages and When they Found 404 It Will Be de-Indexed and You Will be Notified About De-indexation in your Webmaster Tools

    ReplyDelete
  6. its not allowing me to add more than 10 links. its shows me an error

    ReplyDelete
  7. thnk you for this post.. i have applied this on removed post..,

    http://inspiring-desire.blogspot.com/2012/01/consequence-of-social-netwoks.html

    NOw it is redirected to Home page..

    thank you so much..

    ReplyDelete
  8. i am really enjoying the new interface but i faced new problem with it and that is the background of my weblog. at first there was nothing like that but now it shows a sign in the background. will you visit it for once Mustaffa plz. http://deluxepages.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  9. Bro! Please Tell me! I m a newibee to blogger and i don't know what is page rank and what is the need to improve it. Please Send Me Complete Info @ technotweaksteam@gmail.com
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    ReplyDelete
  10. Hey Mohammed Does this also effect the SERPs of the site because i had 248 not found links and my website was not doing well on google search could this be the reason thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I want your help. as if i type wrong url in your blog it redirects me to same page of 404 error. Can you tell me how to do that??

    ReplyDelete
  12. Thanks. A very good tutorial.

    I recently went over the limit of 10 custom redirects. I added an 11th. When I came back all of my redirects were gone. Is this normal? Any way to recover them?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hi Mohammad,
    Thanx a lot for this valuable post. It really helped me a lot. I was searching for a solution for this and finally I found it on your blog. I am a regular visitor of your blog. Please guide me for backlinking also.

    http://www.getalltricks.in

    ReplyDelete
  14. Hi there,

    I re-directed my blogger home page (blog roll) to another static page on my blogger. The issue is that all my pages are editable except for my home page (blog roll). In the back end of blogger I am able to re arrange page order and such and all the other pages still allow me to edit them and add content or delete. The Home Page only had the option to 'edit' or 'view'. When I click on 'edit' it only allows me to re-name the page but it won't show the content at all.

    I have gone back to 'custom redirects' but it doesn't show any of the redirects. I can't seem to view anything to break them or correct this issue.

    Any suggestions?

    Thanks!

    Alli

    ReplyDelete
  15. Many thanks for this post, already went to Google Webmaster and changed all my broken links. But now I have a question, on Google Webmasters I still see the same errors showing, how long until they disappear from the console after this change I made?

    ReplyDelete
  16. I have too much broken link on my site www.tallyssolution.blogspot.com

    Please suggest me how i removed all the broken links & make my site very clean.

    ReplyDelete
  17. hey its really very good post thanks..

    ReplyDelete
  18. Redirect to Home page with '/' doesn't work.

    ReplyDelete
  19. As you said.. If you click the broken link below, it will take you straight to the new related post.

    http://www.mybloggertricks.com/2012/02/hostgator-best-hosting-plans-for.html


    Not working at all.. Redirecting to 404 page.. Its still broken..

    ReplyDelete
  20. I had more than 170 custom redirect configured (all permanent option checked) on the blogger.
    Now all my old redirect are gone and I can not see any of them.😢
    Do you know how to fix it??

    ReplyDelete
  21. Thank you for this tutorial, just on time because I am having problem when I used the custom url. I edited the automated url that blogger generated. The url now is beautiful but I lost the incoming links of that particular post in my blog thank you because I regain it. I'm sorry if I have to delete my previous comment it's intended for Why Google Indexes Only 26 Pages Of Your Blogger Sitemap?

    ReplyDelete
  22. Nice Post Sir :) I like It All time Your Blog Thank You :)

    ReplyDelete
  23. What about using custom 404 page sir? (redirect automatically)

    ReplyDelete