Dead Links On Your Website?

15 Nov 2006 at 12:07 by Eric Morgan

Managing a website with several outgoing links can be a daunting task. Also, do dead links affect SEO? Find answers here.

Do dead links hurt SEO?
There are few that will argue that having many dead links on your website will not hurt your SEO efforts. The main idea behind this is quality. Search engines want to have quality websites come up in their search result pages. A quality website is one that has lots of information, unique content, and no dead links. Think abou it for a minute, have you ever searched for something only to find the resulting webpage outdated and full of links to websites that do not exist? This is frustrating and you will leave quickly, search engines know this.

So how do I manage dead links?
Yes, it can be difficult to keep up with the world wide web and how it changes so often every day. Websites that you are linking to come and go, they have website redesigns with new url structures, transfer to new domains, and so forth. It can be a daunting task to keep up with the updates if you do it manually. After months of trying out several different 'dead link' programs I have found one that is free and very effective, useful, and worth the download. It is called XENU, don't let the website scare you away, it was obviously made by a programmer, not a web designer. You can put in your website URL in this desktop application and it will search all links on your website and in the end give you a report of which links are dead and where the links are on your website. This makes it easy to get a quick snapshot of your website and be able to make updates quickly and effectively.

Isn't there a program that will do everything for me though?
Not that I have found. I don't know of any programs that will connect to your website via ftp, scan all links, and automatically update them. Nor do I think this is actually really possible because of the unique nature of every website on the internet. However if you have any other programs, website, or other resources for managing dead links please post a comment.

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