"Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch."
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
link monitoring can check for broken links
Part of maintaining a professional website is ensuring all of your links arrive at their intended destination. This can be a relatively simple task depending on the size of your website and how extensively it links to external sources. As websites grow over time though, this somewhat simple task for smaller websites can become unmanageable. For larger websites, it can be daunting if not downright impossible to check for broken links. It is worth the effort to maintain links with valid destinations though, and not only to maintain the professionalism and image of your website. Linking to inaccessible URLs can have a detrimental affect on your search engine rankings.
how broken links affect your search engine rankings
Without going into too much detail about Search Engine Optimization, Google uses an algorithm referred to as PageRank. The PageRank of the destination pages you link to from your individual pages contribute to the PageRank of the linking page of your site. PageRank in turn affects your position in Google's search results. If a link from your site goes to an inaccessible destination, the likelihood is that the destination will either have a PageRank of zero or that the next time Google spiders it, it will change the rank of that page to zero. This thereby affects the importance of your site's page due to the diminished PageRank of your linking page to the inaccessible site. Wikipedia explains this in much greater detail. Other search engines use similar algorithms to Google's PageRank.
Suffice it to say, linking to inaccessible sites affects the importance of your site's position in search engine results. UV Uptime has a solution to best keep you out of this situation though; our Broken Link Check feature for Professional and Enterprise Monitoring.
how our link checking program works
Each week Link Check will visit your monitored URL. It will act like a search engine spider and traverse through all of the links on that page in search-engine fashion, up to four levels deep, for links on the same domain of the URL. For links that are off of the URL's domain, it will verify the link from your site is operational but not traverse the external site. You will receive a report each week indicating which links, if any, had accessibility problems and from which page they were linked.
Keeping your links up to date not only increases your professional image, it is a necessary task to ensure your search engine rankings aren't decreased by third-party factors. UV Uptime's Link Check is a simple, comprehensive solution to protect both your image and your PageRank.
Start your check for broken links today with a free two-week trial.
