I just installed the Broken Link Checker plugin. It scans your blog entries and pages and gives you an nice report and way to fix any links that end up in the great web void rather than honest web pages.
Though I installed it for this, my current blog, I was mostly curious what it would say for my archived blog, which has over 3000 entries created over 5 1/2 years. I was nervous, in fact, because I was afraid that I would have to spend a lot of time tracking down and fixing links that were no longer valid.
The good news is that there are only 16 broken links. The bad news is that of the few I quickly checked, I can’t find web addresses that are valid and current. That is, the old content is either gone or is now so well hidden that I can’t locate it. This happens, of course, but is rather sad somehow. Some of the online articles were no longer there because they were from now defunct newspapers. A couple of MIA links were from major IT trades and, if I remember correctly, vanished after some company mergers.
Should you be thinking of moving your content, learn about “redirection,” the way to tell your site where to go when it gets a request for a page that has been moved. This can be done at several levels, from the Apache .htaccess file, to some HTML, PHP, or even via a WordPress plugin. There are other ways to do it as well, depending on how your site is built.
Think twice before casting your content, and your links, into the web void.
Have you visited the web archive ( http://www.archive.org/web/web.php ) ? You may be able to revive the dead links long enough to salvage the missing content. Also, don’t limit yourself to the exact URL. Try trimming the link back to a generic stub (see below) and see what pops up. I’ve retrieved missing pieces (icons, frames, etc.) from neighboring pages to fill in the gaps in my target page.
Good luck.
Dummy example :
Target page -
http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/01/checking-broken-links-in-wordpress-blogs/
Stubbed -
http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/01/checking-broken-links*