Once a week for the next thirty weeks or so I’ll take time out for my normal blogging activities to focus in on some exercises that are designed to improve this site. Normally one would do this sort of thing behind the scenes in private, but I like the idea putting of everything out there to the world and seeing where it takes me. My friend Jo Anne is performing the set of exercises every Friday on her blog and you can check in on her progress by clicking here. All of these exercises will come from the book “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” which you can learn more about over at problogger.net.

Missed a post in this series? Play catch-up using the links below:

 

Dead links suck. They frustrate site visitors who are clicking away, thinking they’ll get a chance to read some fabulously wonderful article I’ve written about one thing or another, but instead they’re suddenly greeted with a dreaded 404 not found error for their efforts. It’s critical that I eradicate all traces of these foul things as quickly and as efficiently as possible to maintain order and respect around here. If I’m linking to things that don’t exist, folks are going to lose faith in the quality of what does exist and in turn decide to go get their read on somewhere else. Losing viewership due to what’s perceived to be poor quality content is something that’s a little bit beyond my control, but dead links, those I can easily minimize.

Luckily this week’s exercise is all about cleaning those nasty little buggers up. How do I find them you ask? Well one way would be to browse the site, page by page, clicking on every link I come into contact with, but that’s just not practical considering the size of the site. The author of the exercise pointed out several online tools that could help, and after investigating a few, I finally settled on the W3C Free Link Checker.

Identifying dead links is one thing, but then what do I do with them? Well, I could update the link so it points at valid content, I could delete the link if it’s outdated, or in extreme cases maybe I would want to delete the article or page that’s linking to the dead link because all of the information it contains is woefully out of date.

I’m happy to report that this here site got a mostly clean bill of health from the link checker. Good for you as a reader because you can rest assured that when you click you’ll get the content you expect, but also good for me because it means I have very little homework to do this week.

Do you check your website for dead links on a regular basis? What tools do you use to do so? Use the comment form below to bring this topic about the dead to life.

Tags: checking the site, dead links, maintenance

This entry was posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.