LinkPatrol is a tool used to help analyze the links found on your WordPress site. This can be very helpful if you've been blogging for quite some time and have a number of links pointing to your website pages from your blog posts.

These links can help your overall SEO and need to be analyzed. If they are broken or have changed, you would normally have to go through the manual process of fixing these links. However, with <a href="https://linkpatrolwp.com/">LinkPatrol</a> from Search Engine Journal, this process is much easier.
<h2>What does LinkPatrol Provide?</h2>
<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7403" src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/LinkPatrol.png" alt="LinkPatrol" width="319" height="102" />

This tool is a plugin for your WordPress website. It will help you to clean up your links on posts and pages. LinkPatrol will find and review your links and they can be sorted by domain, keyword, author and other parameters. You can add the nofollow code, strip links or just fix those not working much faster than trying to handle this task manually.
<h2>Is LinkPatrol Free?</h2>
LinkPatrol isn't a free plugin. It comes at a cost of $50 for one side, $100 for five sites or $200 for 20 sites. You can use the live demo to try the plugin before you buy it, however. Once you buy the plugin and install it, you can access the plugin from your WordPress Dashboard.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7404" src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/WordPressDashboardAccess.png" alt="WordPress Dashboard Access" width="166" height="135" />

The dashboard provides plenty of information once you do a scan on your site.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7405" src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/LinkPatrolDashboard.png" alt="LinkPatrol Dashboard" width="788" height="467" />

From this section, you will be able to see many things, such as the domain for your links, the authors, how many are internal compared to external and so much more. You can use the tabs to search by keyword or look at the different domains and authors. This plugin makes it very easy to add the nofollow tag or strip URLs for specific domain names. You can even see how many links each author is using per post.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-7406" src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/LinksPerPostAuthor.png" alt="Links Per Post Author" width="785" height="278" />

Overall, the plugin will do quite a bit for you and take a manual, time consuming task and turn it into an automatic and fast task.
<h2>Is there a Free Solution?</h2>
Maybe you're just getting started or you don't want to spend the money for LinkPatrol. There is a free solution, but it's not nearly as thorough or powerful as LinkPatrol.

The free plugin is called <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/">Broken Link Checker</a>. This plugin will check your posts, comments, pages and any other comment for missing images and broken links. If any are found, it will tell you about them. However, you will still have to manually fix the link or image.

The plugin is quite powerful and will:
<ul>
	<li>Monitor your content for your</li>
	<li>Detect any links not working</li>
	<li>Send you an email and notify you within your dashboard</li>
	<li>Option to display broken links differently in posts</li>
	<li>Won't allow search engines to follow broken links</li>
	<li>And More!</li>
</ul>
For a free plugin, the Broken Link Checker is quite good, but it cannot possibly compare to the automatic solution of LinkPatrol.
<h2>Why is it Important to Fix and Monitor Your WordPress Site Links?</h2>
Monitoring and fixing your links is quite important o your overall SEO. By doing so, you will be able to protect your site from a lower ranking. Some of the benefits include:
<ul>
	<li>Avoid a Bad User Experience - There's nothing more annoying than reading a blog post with a recommendation for something you want, but the link doesn't work. This hurts the user experience and can hurt your SEO.</li>
	<li>Eliminate Outdated Information - If a website is no longer available, yet you have a post linking to it, this can cause SEO issues. By monitoring your links, you will be able to avoid this issue.</li>
	<li>Better Link Juice and Flow - When you link to posts, pages and external websites, you need the link juice and the flow to be correct. If a link is broken, not working or doesn't have the nofollow when it should, this can interrupt your flow and link juice.</li>
</ul>
These are just a few reasons why it's important to monitor your WordPress site links. Whether you choose LinkPatrol or the free plugin for WordPress, you should always keep a close eye on any broken or outdated links on your website.