Link Rot Kills

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by Jim Daniels

Have you ever run a link checking program on your Web site? No, not one of those quickie link checks, but a "full site" link check?

What you learn about your Web site may disturb you. It happened to me this week. As owner of a fairly large Web site that has been online about four years, I realized I may have had a number of dead links. I just had no idea how many. Sure, I'd been averaging a few "dead-link complaints" every month lately, but I always thought I ran a pretty tight ship.

I thought wrong. I finally ran a full site link check and found that my site had a severe case of link rot!

While my internal links (links within my own site from one page to another) were pretty good with just two dead links, get this... THIRTY external links had rotted away without me knowing it! Shame on me. Not only does this portray a bad image, it can cause other problems as well.

For starters, bad links send visitors scurrying away from your site. Additionally, search engines tend to favor sites WITHOUT link problems and give higher ranking to sites who keep up on their link maintenance.

So what about your site? You probably have dead links on your site right now too, and you are not alone. Studies show that on average, one out of every 15 links on the Web is not functioning. If your site is that bad, you're in trouble. Heck, if one out of every 20 links on your site is dead there's a good chance that EVERY visitor to your site will find a dead link. Think about that for a minute. Are you willing to risk losing every visitor to your Web site? I thought not.

The solution is to periodically and systematically check for link rot, especially if your site contains links to other Web sites. Take time and do it today! I researched some programs this week that you can simply turn loose before you go to bed and you'll wake up with a fresh list of bum links to fix. Here they are...