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I recently took a look at our site using Ahref's Site Explorer and noticed that we currently have ~1,400 broken links. Essentially, these are questions/answers that link out to pages that 404. Fixing these is certainly something we want to take care of before it gets too out of hand.

I'll be chipping away at these over time, but thought I'd post here and open up the initiative to the community. If you'd like to help out, I've created a Google Doc to keep track of this. Taking a just few minutes to fix a couple links whenever you think about it will help a lot!

11.21 Broken Link Archive - ProWebmasters

^ Anyone can edit. Log and legend are in the README.

For an example of what a good fix looks like see my edits to this answer https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/61537/122139

Googling keywords from the broken URL is a great strategy to find replacement links e.g. example.com/search-me-on-google

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  • How should we edit when they are finished? Mark them done somehow? Delete the row?
    – Stephen Ostermiller Mod
    Nov 27, 2021 at 20:41
  • @StephenOstermiller In the README right now I have fixed ones highlighted green but you could also strikethrough the row to make it more clear. Whatever works really.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Nov 27, 2021 at 20:53
  • 1
    If there is a site that is frequently referenced, and its URL format changes in a simple way that breaks a bunch of links in posts on the site, staff may be able to help. See this MSE post: How to find and/or change a set of hyperlinks on a site? As Yaakov Ellis noted in a comment on another question, we have a bulk URL-replacement tool use that does a strict find-and-replace (no wildcards, no regex).
    – V2Blast
    Feb 4, 2022 at 23:39

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This is going to be a big project, but I'm glad Mike set this up for us.

There is going to be no way to edit posts without bumping them to the front page. Because of this, please observe two rules:

  • Limit your link fixes to a handful a day (certainly no more than ten) to avoid completely flooding the front page.
  • Fix ALL the problems, not just the broken links. If there are other spelling, grammar, or clarity edits that need to be made on that post or other posts on the page, do those too. If it needs to edited and bumped, please make it worth it.

Only moderators can edit comments. If there is a broken link in a comment, please flag the comment. If the comment can be removed, please use the "no longer needed" reason. Otherwise write what you would like the moderator to do such as remove the link or provide an updated link.

Only moderators can edit user profiles. I think it is appropriate for a moderator to remove broken links from user profiles. However, there is no way to flag a user profile to get moderators to look at it. I'm not sure exactly what the best way to handle those links would be. The options are:

  • Flag a post the user made and explain that there is a broken link on the profile.
  • Skip the links in the spreadsheet and let a moderator come along and take care of them later. I've gone ahead and removed the first few broken links from user profiles already.
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