Why You Should Keep an Eye on Your 404 Stats

Recently, I installed the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress, to keep an eye on my outgoing links. You could also use Xenu Link Sleuth to do this, but having a plugin doing this regularly, and to see the broken links show up in your WP dashboard makes it much more actionable. And even better: cleaning up the broken links only takes a few minutes.

The first report of the Broken Link Checker listed 92 broken links, out of a total of nearly 2,000 links. When ran through this list manually, I noticed that most of the broken links were the result of a new URL structure and bad redirection. Because I wanted to keep most of the links intact (I linked to them in the past, so they should probably still be link worthy, right?), I tried to find the new URL of the 404-ing page first. If the search functionality of the site didn’t point me to the right page, I just dropped the link. Of the 92 broken links, I had to drop 49, which is more than half of them…

What I found most shocking, was that about 75% of all the broken links pointed to web savvy sites, including several SEO blogs. Making sure that you redirect all pages properly when you adjust your URL structure, and checking your 404 statistics regularly both seem pretty basic SEO skills to me.

With new (popular) plugins like this, and with smart folks chasing down other people’s 404s to build links, I’d strongly advise you to keep a close eye on your 404 statistics…