Broken Links: Maintain or Parish

Broken Links: Maintain or Perish (in SEO)

Even back in the early 1990's when HTML pages were using the most primitive and annoying incoherent coding ever, the basics were always there. Broken links was one of these along with meta tags. Having broken links was one of the most severe problems you could have at the time and tools of every type written in C# and Perl to address them. Now, the web and search engines have come along way. No longer is it the biggest problem, but it does remain an important item on the checklist for SEO and website development.

It's a good practice to check these regularly because things happen. Scripts and dynamic solutions can mess up, databases can go corrupt, links that you placed to other sites may not resolve anymore (site could have expired, changed link location, deleted the URL, etc) and this:

A) makes you and your site look bad from a user standpoint,

B) demonstrates the potential to be of lesser importance to search engines, certainly if this occurs many times,

C) can have adverse impact on your SEO campaigns and

D) can turn users off from usig your site and ever returning. With all of the content and sites that exist out there on the world wide web, what incentive does a user have to stay on a site that doesn't deliver an experience - the right experience that person is looking for? None.

So for many more reasons than to elevate and maintain your search engine rankings, you've got to ensure users aren't leaving your site due to such a simple and embarrassing oversight.