Loren Baker at Daily SEO Tip recommends checking your website for broken links as an important step towards improved SEO. He says that "if your site delivers error pages or links to non-existent pages or files on your server, then search engines like Google are going to consider your site as being “under construction“, and therefore not being useful or relevant to the human user.
Conversely, Barker observes that:
"Working on client SEO accounts, I have run into numerous issues where fixing some internal broken links, outbound links, and making sure all of the files on the server are working have boosted a site ranking from pages 3 or 4, to page one."
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Baker suggests using Xenu's Link Sleuth to find broken links. Xenu crawls a site much like a search engine spider does and identifies numerous issues, including broken links, duplicate content, broken images and multimedia files, images that lack "alt" attributes, images and files that may take undue amounts of time to load, and problems with redirected pages on the site.
Baker also recommends looking for duplicate content on sites since Google frowns on this. One free tool for this purpose is Virante Duplicate Content, which offers a simple diagnosis of a site that reveals common www vs. non-www content, the current cache stored by Google, default page errors, incorrect 404 pages, and supplemental pages existing in Google's index.
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