Check your links carefully or pay the consequences

Hi

Do you have a website with a lot of pages?

Have you got Googlebot visiting your site? To find out check your webstats.

For some time I have been noticing a 404 Page not found on Broken Link Checkers.
With more than 30 pages on my site and a lot of links to other websites I struggled to find the broken links.

It may seem easier to quickly scan your website instead take the time to ensure ALL your links are valid & working.

Part of Google's guidelines state that your site should be complete with no links broken. If you're looking to get a good listing its really, really important that no pages are missing - mine was I had named the page incorrectly which was causing the broken links.

I had put in a 404 response offering the user a message stating the page did not exist and to continue with the rest of the website using the links on the left.

This was at least professional but would still cause confusion with most users.

If you have worked hard to get visitors to your site then make the last bit of extra effort BEFORE you set your site live to check all your links are functioning. By doing so you'll be doing yourself, your visitors and the search engines a major favour.

Cheers

ukdaz