How to remove broken links from our wordpress site?

[hsma]

Hello! How are you? We just signed up to Moz.com. Moz link tool. It gave us many broken links with 404's and 302's. Could you please help me with deleting the links? Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Sean

You will have to manually go in and remove or change these links in Wordpress.

Download the list from Moz, create a spreadsheet of the URLs with the anchor text of the links, and create a column for if they are completed or not.

Here are resources on internal and external links - make sure your links are pointing to live and relevant pages; if they aren't, change them or remove them. If they are redirecting, simply correct the link.

You will also want to make sure your XML sitemap is up to date in case crawls are finding errors that are not link related.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[hsma]

our site is http://ablesafety.com/. There are like 260 broken links. I have already downloaded the excel sheet. But how will edit manually and delete the link. I used a wordpress pluing that called Broken Link Checker. But it is not effective. Your help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Sean

You will have to go to each page and change the links if they are in content. Do you have access to your website and editing capabilities?

[hsma]

Hello Patrick,

Yes! I am wordpress admin panel, but some of these links are deletable. I was assuming, that they would be back links. Especially with 404s. Thanks again!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Sean

I am a bit confused - are you saying that you are finding links on your website that are 404 and 302ing?

If so, my information above still stands.

However, if you are saying that you are finding links pointing TO your site from other websites, then you will need to conduct a backlink audit and research which links you want to remove and links you will want to keep and therefore correct - meaning you will have to reach out to websites and ask them to edit the links pointing to your website.

Does that make sense? Hope this helps! Good luck!

[N1ghteyes]

What Patrick Delehanty has said is completely correct. You need to edit your pages, menu's etc in order to remove or fix the links that have 404's if they are part of your website.

If the links are external websites linking to you, you need to setup redirects in your .htaccess file for them. The later is considerably more technical so if your not confident with it, ask your developer to do it for you.

If your not sure which it is, could you provide is with an example of a link that shows as a 404?

You can also use Xenu to check the links on your site (not the ones linking to it), i find it works better than the Broken Link Checker plugin.

[MickEdwards]

The first thing I would do is look at the main menu as is is broken giving you lots of 404's.

training-courses/ and all the ?active variations
faq/
flagger_certification/
osha-violations/violation/

[Mustansar]

you can also check with this site http://www.wpexplorer.com/how-to-remove-broken-links/

it may help you to understand the procedure for removing the links.

[hsma]

This post is deleted!

[hsma]

Hello Ikkie,

how are you? I have already used broken link checker. It does help identifying some of the broken links, and deleting them. My speculation is the template that the website is on, was used for another website before. I have a feeling that some of those links were imported to the site.

[N1ghteyes]

Looks like you've been hacked then,

You'll need to clean out your code and content and make sure wordpress and all of its plugins are the latest version. Unfortunatly there is no 'Safe' way to recover from this without reverting to a backup from before the hack.

https://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked

EDIT::
I deleted my other response because i fail at reading :P, sorry about that

[N1ghteyes]

This post is deleted!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi Sean

This looks like you got spammed or hacked - do not redirect these links. Did you guys have a SEO team at any point that was buying links?

I would actually look into these:
Link Audit Guide for Effective Link Removals & Risk Mitigation
A More Robust Process for Dealing with Link Removal Requests

I would also look into disavowing backlinks. This could be a potentially big issue for you and your site.

Do you have a Webmaster Tools account? I would pull your top links and also check and see if you have a Manual Action at all. Also, check out this Wordpress resource on hacked sites.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Good luck!

[fatetmpwcosl]

Well the keyword checker device is down, I could additionally endorse gear that you might want to find a tutor to test out: Open Site Explorer and their new Twitter tool FollowerWonk.