BWMagic’s Internet Marketing Newsletter


Are Broken Links Hurting Your Site?

There’s nothing as annoying as finding a great webpage
with lots of good content – but then when you click
a link the dreaded “Page Not Found” pops up or worse yet,
nothing at all pops up.


We have all been there, done that.


However, if those broken links are on your site, then
you do have a problem.

Not only won’t your visitors be pleased but broken links,
both internal and external, are a real problem for the
search engines. These engines use simple bots/spiders
to crawl/index your content – hitting a broken link is like
going down a dead-end street.

Broken links can stop the indexing of your content
and should be fixed for this reason alone. Besides,
you want a clean site with everything working, if you
want happy repeat visitors to your site.

But there is a larger problem with broken links and it
has everything to do with the “quality” of your site.
As you probably already know, this past year, Google
launched its powerful Panda Update, this Update was
different because for the first time Google was not
just ranking an individual webpage, but your whole
site.

Panda and the countless algorithm changes since have
placed greater emphasis on the OVERALL quality of your
site and how your keywords/pages rank in Google.

So now, more than ever, the quality of your site matters.
Your whole site and not just one or two pages which
rank high.

Broken links are a sign that your site is not maintained
or up to date. If you have 10’s or even 100’s of broken
links – this will bring down the quality of your site,
not to mention, you will have a lot of unhappy campers
visiting your site.


Fix broken links with Xenu!


So you must regularly check your site for broken links
and fix them. One of the best resources I have found is
a free software called “Xenu’s Link Sleuth” and it’s very
easy to use.


https://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Just type in your URL and this software will crawl your
site and give you a list of any broken links. Best part,
you can tell this software to only check for internal links or
you can check for both internal and external links on your
site.

It offers up a very comprehensive report which you can use.
Plus, it can also give you a Sitemap to submit to the
search engines.

So improve your site’s quality by fixing any and all broken links
– the search engines will thank you!

Helping People Succeed Online Since 2002!

Kind Regards,
Titus Hoskins

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