Guides
Short, practical reads — no fluff, no jargon.
Read as pages: Why do broken links hurt SEO? · How do redirect chains leak link equity? · What does my Link Health grade mean? · How do I tune link scans for shared hosting? · LinkGuard home
Why broken links hurt SEO
Search engines crawl your site the same way visitors browse it: by following links. Every link that returns a 404 is a dead end that wastes crawl budget — time Google could have spent indexing pages that matter.
Broken links also send a quality signal. A site littered with dead ends looks unmaintained, and pages that accumulate broken outbound links tend to drift down in rankings as their perceived usefulness drops. For visitors the effect is more direct: hitting a 404 is the single fastest way to end a session.
The fix is unglamorous but effective: find dead links before your visitors do, then repair, replace, or remove them. That's the whole reason LinkGuard scans in the background on a schedule instead of waiting for someone to complain.
LinkGuard flags anything returning 400+ status codes, DNS failures, and timeouts — internal and external, links and images.
How redirects leak link equity
A single, sensible redirect is fine — search engines follow it and pass along almost all of the original page's authority. The problem is chains: link → redirect → redirect → destination.
Each extra hop adds latency for visitors and risk for crawlers. Google has said it follows a limited number of hops before giving up, and every hop is one more opportunity for something to break silently later — an expired domain in the middle, an http→https bounce, a trailing-slash ping-pong.
Chains usually appear gradually: you moved a page in 2023, restructured in 2024, switched to HTTPS somewhere in between. Nobody links through three moves on purpose.
LinkGuard flags any link that passes through two or more redirects, and shows you the final destination — update the link to point there directly.
Reading your Link Health grade
The grade on your LinkGuard dashboard compresses the state of every checked link into one letter:
A — no broken links, no redirect chains. B — nothing broken, but some links pass through redirect chains. C — up to 5% of checked links are broken. D — up to 15%. F — more than 15% of your links are dead.
Two details worth knowing: timeouts count as broken (a link that never loads is broken from your visitor's point of view), and stale data lowers the grade one letter — if the last full scan is much older than your scan interval, an "A" you can't trust shouldn't look pristine.
Dismissed links don't count against your grade — use Dismiss for false positives like login-walled URLs.
Tuning scans for shared hosting
LinkGuard is deliberately gentle: it checks links in small batches, pauses between requests, stops each run after a short time budget, and skips runs entirely while your server's load average is high. On most hosting the defaults are right.
On very constrained shared hosting, two settings help. Batch size (Settings → Scanning) controls how many URLs are checked per 5-minute background run — drop it from 50 to 20 and a full scan simply spreads across more runs. Pause when server load exceeds sets the load-average threshold; the default (0) auto-detects your CPU count, but you can set it to 1 on a single-core box.
Everything runs through WP-Cron, so scans piggyback on normal traffic. If your host disables WP-Cron, point a real cron job at wp-cron.php every five minutes and LinkGuard works exactly the same.
Scans never run concurrently and each unique URL is checked once per cycle, no matter how many posts link to it.