Today I finally got around to doing some needed cleanup on my blog. The Google Webmaster tools have been complaining to me for a really long time about the number of broken links I had on my site. As it turns out, I had about 5 times what Google said I had. Ouch!
I discovered this by grabbing a plugin for WordPress called (conveniently) Broken Link Checker. This nifty little plugin ran in the background and searched through my 6+ years worth of blog entries to find all of my links that no longer resolve to anything useful.
So I spent the better part of the day fixing broken links. The majority of my broken links came from linking to the various CBC websites for any of the news articles I posted about over the years. It seems that CBC has moved a lot of their articles to new locations. Some I could find but many (especially the ones not linked thorugh the main website) are no longer available. Unfortunately that meant I had to delete the relevant links on the posts.
As for the Broken Link Checker plugin, it seems to run a lot. I’ve been watching my logs all afternoon (yeah, me=geek) and it seems to run on almost every request coming to WordPress. That’s probably a little excessive. The easy fix is to simply disable the plugin the majority of the time and only run it every few months.