Link rot is something that few web site owners focus on, even though it may have a negative impact on a site’s rankings over time.
The term link rot is used to describe links that become broken over time. If you have a site that links out to lots of other sites, some of those links will become broken over time. Site owners sometimes change the URL structure of their sites and other sites simply shut down. Either way, a broken link is likely to be created because the URL being linked to no longer exists. This phenomenon is also referred to as broken links, link decay and dead links.
How is Link Rot a Problem?
A few broken links are not likely to harm a site, but large numbers that accumulate over time could affect your rankings. The search engines expect a site owner to keep their sites updated.
Link rot affects not only links to other sites, but also links to pages within a site. If pages are deleted over time or the URL structure of a site is changed, any internal link URL that is not valid will create a broken link and add to link rot.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines advises site owners to “Check for broken links and correct HTML”.
Guidelines for successful indexing warns mostly about broken links to internal pages with the statement, “If your site contains broken links, Bing might not be able to index your site effectively, thus preventing people from reaching all of your pages.”
Any statement made in the Webmaster Guidelines pages for Google, Yahoo and Bing should be taken seriously, because these pages contain the rules and warnings about issues that could affect a site’s rankings. A site is no longer in full compliance if any of the rules are broken.
How to Identify Broken Links
There are several “link checking tools” that will scan through a site and verify all of the links, both internal and external. These tools will send a spider through the site that collects all of the URLs and then verifies that they are connecting with a web page. Most tools will also check the validity of links to images, as well.
The most popular free tool that is installed on a PC is Xenu Link Slueth. The author’s site is a little cheesy, but the link checker does work and has been popular for many years.
There are other free tools on the web that check for broken links, but be careful about what you download from sites that you are no familiar with. Always use a virus checker to scan all downloaded files before clicking on a file and installing something on your PC.
Every site owner should periodically run a broken link checking scan of their site and fix every broken link that is identified.
