actinic
online marketing blog
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Broken links - how much do they matter?
A broken link is a link on a web page that points to something that doesn't exist. This can be caused by an error in the link; or by the removal of (or failure to upload) the object it points to.
How much do broken links matter? One broken link on a large site may not seem to matter all that much; but it matters to the person who clicks on it! Left unmanaged, though, broken links will multiply over time and can significantly degrade the quality of the site.
Broken links = lost business
In the long run, broken links result in lost business, because they have several negative effects on the site.
- Lost Page Rank. A link is the means by which one page donates page rank to another. If a link points to the wrong place, the intended destination page won't inherit any page rank from the page the link is on.
- Search engine penalty. A page containing a broken link may have its page rank reduced. A site with a lot of broken links may be downgraded by the search engines as being of poor quality.
- Lost listings. If a link is faulty, search engines will be unable to follow it to the next page. This may result in the search engine not updating its index for that page, or worse, not listing the page at all.
- Lost visitors. Search engines are the number one source of new visitors to web sites. Anything that damages your profile on the search engines will reduce the number of new visitors you attract.
- Lost customers. Visitors to your site who click on a broken link will be redirected to your error page, if you have one. If not, they will just get a 404 'Page not found' error. Most of them won't waste time hunting around your site for the thing they wanted. They will go and look elsewhere.
Dealing with broken links is quite easy. You can either download and run a software link checker like Xenu's Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html), which is free and widely used; or you can use an online service that does the same job – such as the one provided by Webmaster Toolkit (www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-checker.shtml),, which can also check for missing images.
If you've never done it, you may be surprised at how many broken links your site has, and it may take a while to work through and fix them all. Done regularly, though, it is not an onerous task; and will improve both the quality of your site for visitors, and its search engine performance.
# posted by Actinic @ 2:03 AM 
