In Day 27 of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, Darren reminds us that “blogging is build on the link”. The interchange of links on a blog helps rank it more highly with search engines, provides resources to readers of the blog, and lifts the entire blogging community.
But what happens when a link becomes dead? Link rot happens – that’s all there is to it. But bloggers have to watch out because dead links can hurt your blog big-time.
Your readers are effected because it’s frustrating to them to click a link you told them to go to, and then find a dead or blank page. And your blog is effected because Google sees you linking to webpages that don’t exist and (while no one can say for sure how much) it seems to effect your rankings negatively.
There are many link checking tools available. Dead-Links.com is one, Link Valet is another. There is a WordPress plugin called Broken Link checker that I am testing out as well and it seems pretty effective.
When you find a dead link you can replace the link with another link that works, delete the link completely or even delete the entire post. I generally prefer not to do that, personally, because I don’t want to create dead incoming links into my own blog if someone had linked in to that post. Even just updating the post to say, hey this company has gone out of business or this webpage has moved, or here’s another alternative to this great dingle-hopper, etc. can be an effective way to handle this.
Have you ever checked your site for dead outgoing links? I haven’t checked this site in a very long time . I guess it’s overdue for the task! Let’s do this task together to better our blogs.
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