How often do you check your blog for dead links? Doing a regular check is important as it can identify any broken or dead links within your blog, and any dead links leaving your blog.
Having a link that points to a site or page that no longer exists is a waste of a link. You are should remove and dead links and either leave them out altogether, or point them to content that exists.
More importantly, you need to be able to find broken or dead links within your own site. If you don’t delete or rename content, the only issue will be broken links. These are often caused by typo’s when you first created the link.
If you have modified URL’s for some reason, a link checker can help you find the links to the old URL. Update them to new URL and everything will be fine. Search engines don’t particularly like broken or dead links. Incorporating a good 404 redirect page is a must.
Internal links are of particular importance. You have obviously linked two pages together for a reason. If that link is broken for whatever reason then the link proves will halt at the breakage therefore not achieving your desired outcome.
One of the more common problems is the moving deleting of images. If you have used those images in a post and then moved, removed or renamed the image, it will appear on your page as a broken link.
There are several good link checkers:
There are many others including plugins for WodPress. Try one out on your site and see how many broken links you have.
Funny that you’ve brought this up, I just spent a few hours cleaning up some 404 errors.