- Image via Wikipedia
A couple of years ago, I was interviewed for podcast. Of course I linked to it in one of my blog posts as well as my own podcast show notes.
About a year or so later I received an email from one of my podcast listeners informing me that a link on my site was going to a porn site!
*Gulp*
I quickly went back to the post she mentioned and realized that the podcast had podfaded. He had let go of the url, and the url was now a porn site! I had linked to that url at least 5 times on my site.
That was when I began to make checking my links of great importance.
Websites, blogs, podcasts, media links come and go. As I initially browsed through my blogroll I realized that almost half of what I was linking to was no longer in existence. This made me have to get really clear about cleaning up my all my links.
Here’s a little check list to help you keep your links all nice and clean 🙂
- Your Sidebar/Blogroll– Literally go down your sidebar and click onto everything that you have on the entire column. Make sure that you are sending people where you want them to go. Remove or update any dead links.
- Six Months of Links– Go back to your last six months worth of posts and browse through to make sure that links that you used or referred to are actually working and in existence. Update as necessary to keep at minimum your latest post linking efficiently.
- Videos– Videos are removed all the time. Having their code on your site slows down the loading of the post, plus irritates those that want to watch the now defunct video. Save them the hassle by removing the code or take the time to check to see if the video is available from a different video sharing service.
- Image Links– When I first started blogging and podcasting I often linked back to images and graphics on other people’s websites. I had no idea about proper protocol. I’m still finding missing graphics and pictures on my older posts. Take the time to browse through your posts to make sure your images are all properly displaying.
- Links to time sensitive material– Think about all the times that you promoted or shared links to events or event sites/pages that were time sensitive ie. podcamp boston 2008 sessions, macworld podcast meet-up 2007, PNME 2007 schedule, etc. Go back and un-link your references if they lead to a dead page. You can always do a quick-update and either link to a larger website with consistent relevant information, such as the main Podcamp site or write a one sentence update about the event mentioned.
On your site, the areas that have the largest amount of dead links are on your oldest posts. Going back through all your posts, especially if you’ve been podcasting for a long time is a tedious job. Consider setting aside some time monthly to take care of it yourself, or perhaps invest on a little help from those places like fiverr 🙂
I hope you have found these tips helpful!
Do you have any good tips, workflow or even plug-ins/software that could make checking dead links on your site easier? Share them! I’m always up for making my life easier 😀 I’m sure other folks would love to hear about them!
