Typically, since links rotate, or are displayed in random order, it is very hard to detect if any links are broken. It would take a lot of work on the part of the webmaster to check all the links.

Web Ring History

The web ring was born in 1994/5, created by Sage Weil, and is said to have died in 2001 under Yahoo’s reign. Ringmasters, the people who maintain and organize web rings, became more and more relegated to the background as “Web 2.0” emerged. Unfortunately, web rings were being associated with loud banner ads, annoying graphics, blinking text and horrible font colours. Read the whole story here.

Popular Web Rings

The most popular web rings are grouped by topic so you can “surf” after starting from one of these sites:

Search your favourite topic and explore web rings starting from these two sites:

• http://www.bravenet.com/search/sitering.php
• http://www.ringsworld.com

Hebrew web ring site from Israel:

• http://www.webring.co.il

More history and interesting facts about web rings:

• http://www.webringworld.org

Web Rings of the Future

It seems that web rings have an uncertain future. After 2001, there was a huge boom (after the bust) in the commercialization of the web. As corporate web presence grew, the homespun web got less and less popular. Web rings faded unless you were a Ringmaster with a strong community following. Corporations are a little less likely to bring a collaborative spirit to reignite the web ring concept. Lately – it’s all about keeping eyeballs on your site and converting them to sales, not surfing on a Sunday afternoon.

Link Exchange Scripts

Separated at birth, link exchange scripts are related to web rings. Link exchange programs have became very popular since the rise of web scripting languages. Many of link exchange scripts became fully automated which was a great time saver and greeted with enthusiasm. However, these automatic scripts cause many issues as well because webmasters forget to look after them.

Despite the fact that some link exchange scripts have the ability to “check the links”, these scripts are often abused by spammers because the webmasters are not as worried about them. Bad links get submitted daily as a result, ruining the user experience.

One of the first link exchange companies, LinkExchange, brought a little bit of “real-world” advertising to the warm, fuzzy world of Internet information sharing. LinkExchange was touted as a site that had an incredible reach to consumers looking for things and resources in a specific niche. Advertising on the site brought legitimacy as an ecommerce website. It also brought more eyeballs to whatever you were promoting – very powerful audience numbers before social networking came along.

Social Networking, Bookmarking Gadgets, Widgets and Scripts – oh my!

These methods have become the easiest way to share links when compared to other mentioned in this article. However, so may webmasters miss this aspect (isn’t StumbleUpon.com just a random web ring after all?) Despite that, URLs may look real in the browser but many of them are generated using JavaScript; this makes some links invisible or some of them broken to web robots like GoogleBot. The software mentioned above should not be avoided, but we’d like to emphasize that scripts and software usually cause linking troubles.

What should you do to be safe? “Nofollow” everything you find suspicious on your site. If social bookmarking has a specific URL, you can hide that from robots using robots.txt. Also, always check your site using LinkAider, our reporting module will provide the reports you need to fix broken or bad links.

Some companies close. Here are four major examples of companies who have closed or probably shutting down their sites in the near future:

Vidoop is closing. They were an OpenID start-up that has run out of money. The story of Vidoop can be followed here. When an insider provides so many details about the company, people at the top, and how they were treated, it can start to set off alarm bells.

Trusera closed in May 2009, not quite surviving to its first birthday (June 2008). The funding just wasn’t there and the “economy” took this health and wellness sharing site down. There are a lot of social networks out there and journal-type sites. Keep in mind that there are only so many “niche” markets that can keep the momentum.

Portfolio is also closing. Information about the circumstances can be found here. There are approximately 5 million links to that website and an update states that it is soon to be “reborn” – most likely with new paths/links along with it. Despite the fact that the site is live for now, these links could become dead anytime now (hopefully not).

Geocities has closed. This shut down that was planned for quite some time. We are not sure if the content will stay there, but Geocities was the home of many personal websites (long before blogs exploded in popularity). Many people were self-taught and learned the basics of coding before their careers began using Geocities. There was a lot of Twitter traffic as well with many cyber-enthusiasts tweeting nostalgic RIP comments. More information about the site’s closure can be found here. The popular web comic, XKCD also had a tribute to Geocities’ design.

Some Content Management System plug-ins get discontinued.

WordPress is the most popular CMS software for blogging. It’s used extensively for personal and small business use. One of the reasons it is so popular is because it has thousands of plug-ins to bring specific functionality to your site or blog. For example, the Affiliate Store Plug-in provides a way to bring a large number of products to your site from several affiliate partners. This is powerful because you reap the rewards of being an affiliate and having links to your blog for popular products. However, this plug-in will be discontinued! You must handle the code yourself because the creator has decided to focus on other things. Sorry – just deal with it. The lesson? Before you use a plug-in, check out its history and do some research about the creator and its longevity. A little bit of research up front may save you a lot of fixes in the future.

Simple CMS by Pixopoint is another plug-in that has been discontinued. Paid custom development is now required to maintain this for your site. Unfortunately, many more get discontinued every day. For example, westonruter has announced that he is no longer working on these plug-ins.

Even though many of these plug-ins are working now, they could break on the next CMS update. Unfortunately, you may have to pay for a high-priced WordPress developer if this is the case. So be careful and do some research if you can – and use LinkAider’s automatic scheduler for checking for broken links. You never know how many headaches it will save you in the future.

A “permanent” broken link occurs when a domain name is completely inaccessible or has expired. The domain wasn’t renewed by the webmaster – abandoned only to be bought by spammers who now have the advantage of the site’s former Internet credibility. Other sites that have a link to that domain now have sent their users to the spammer’s site.

Obviously, it’s good practice to know when certain domains expire, especially your own. One of the more popular services is Go Daddy, who will monitor expiry date and domain information for a fee in return. This is good and bad: you might be a responsible and proactive webmaster, who renews in plenty of time, or you could be a spammer waiting to pounce.

If you find a domain inaccessible error, you should look for alternatives or cached content – refer to this LinkAider blog post for more information about how to deal with broken links.

“Temporary” broken links occur when sites go down for maintenance from time to time. Other sites experience network or software errors. In these cases, you’ll probably see a custom error message explaining what has happened. Twitter is the most obvious example of constant downtimes. Its infamous downtime has become the topic of Internet folklore and is a part of many jokes already. Furthermore, Twitter was the inspiration for funny projects like: istwitterdown.com (now defunct itself – how ironic!) August 2009 was rather tough for Twitter according to the chart from the pingdom monitoring service. Growing pains or maintenance can take a toll – but downtime on a social network is not as serious as downtime for your income-generating site. Although these days you may argue that Twitter now provides this type of service and should be making uptime guarantees like other hosting providers.

Hosting providers build contracts around guarantees for uptime. Typically, they are expressed using a percentage. Percentages put a context around the amount of time that a server/hardware/network is continually available (its availability). Percentages make the hosting contract look great at first sight. However, let’s do some math. If a hosting provider says:

• 90% uptime, it means the server may be down 876 hours a year
• 95% = 438 hours down
• 99% = 87 hours, 36 minutes
• 99.9% = 8 hours, 45 minutes, 36 seconds
• 99.99% = 52 minutes, 33.6 seconds
• 99.999% = 5 minutes, 15.36 seconds
• 99.9999% = 31.68 seconds

Of course, these are just network guarantees. Webmasters can also experience some downtime (on top of that) due to script mis-configuration, bad coding or human errors.

Also, when double checking and/or fixing your broken links manually, keep in mind that some websites may be inaccessible within a certain network location or country. So if you have some doubts, check services like these: downforeveryoneorjustme.com and dingitsup.com.

Downforeveryoneorjustme.com is a nice test to do when your users tell you that a site is down. You can check it online and then diagnose the problem – it might be their machine, not the server or the network.

Dingitsup.com sends a text message to let you know when a site is back up or has gone down. Be the first one to know if a site goes down before your end-users or customers start calling. The last thing you want to send out is a large email campaign and have a flood of complaints about a site that is unavailable.

In summary, if you have any doubts about a domain link, double-checking is always the safest route. If you’ve already signed up with LinkAider, you know that you can re-run your broken link report with a single click. If you haven’t signed up yet, consider doing it now. It’s free.

Fix it:

• Link to Google’s index. Google keeps a copy of the page when it crawls to index your website. Unfortunately, Google’s index has an expiration date. Use this option only when your target page is down temporarily. When Google re-indexes, it is known as a fresh crawl. To learn more about indexing, check out googleguide.com.
• Link to archive.org. This site has archived the web since 1996 and FAQ page will help you get started. Use it proactively as a backup option too.
• Use services such as WebCite, an on-demand archive, or the Iterasi web archive. Iterasi has some archived site examples that are public if you need to persuade anyone.
• Perform a Google search to find an alternate copy of a missing page and grab the content you need to reset the link.

Prevention 101 for your 404s:

When moving an article, use a “redirect” (procedure or coded file) to help preserve your search engine rankings:

• IIS Redirect: You can use Properties in IIS to redirect to another website or directory, single file, or a program. Be sure you are part of the Administrator’s group on your local computer.
• .htaccess Redirect: (for Apache) Create and add code to a redirect .htaccess file and place it in your root directory.

You should also create custom 404 pages. The main goal is to keep your visitor on the site and direct them to other page links to keep them engaged. You don’t want visitors to close the browser or navigate away.

The first step is to create the HTML page for the custom 404 in your editor. You may want to consult with your Marketing team to get an outside opinion on the copy or graphics. Ideally, you need to reduce the “shock” factor to make it a seamless experience. This way, the viewer is not inconvenienced and barely notices the fact that they have accessed a broken link.

Instructions to insert your custom 404 page can be found online for IIS and Apache.

Finally, test your 404 page to be sure the user experience matches your website goals. You could set up several 404 page designs and track the navigation results to determine the best 404 page option for your viewer.

For those interested in further reading about 404s and best practices, check out alistapart.com and Google. There are also many examples of creative 404 pages on the web to get ideas.

Common and very annoying errors are:

• Huge 404 pages
  A user is supposed to wait while 50kb or larger hmtl stuffed with irrelevant pictures loads just to see a message that there is no page he was looking for.
• Missing scripts and/or images
  Some developers just clone their 404 pages from their sites’ codes forgetting to fix file paths. Result: ugly and broken error pages.
• Misleading error messages
  These sound like: “This item is no longer available for sale. Search for this item in the search box.” (If this item is no longer available what should I search for? And was your faq.php for sale?), “There are no tickets to this event” and similar.
• Full-page ads
  Well, these are no errors actually, but it is not too polite to show a full page ad for 5 to 20 seconds and then redirect a user to a non existing page.
• Automatic redirects
  Some websites show their error pages for 3 – 5 seconds telling that the user will be redirected to the main page. Where the error page is stuffed with other content and error message is a thin line hidden somewhere between banners and 100+ line long sitemap. If you are showing error message – get user some time to read it, because sometimes it’s hard to understand why you are redirected out of the sudden.
• Showing completely different content instead of the old one (while website headers return 404)
  This technique is very extensively used among news sites. And sometimes it’s hard to get why I see an article about shoes when I clicked the link to hat fashion article.

But we’ve also found many nice 404 page designs that really help users who are lost on the internet highway. And here we’ll show you some of our findings:

5ives.com

A Buddhistic message to the visitor

campaignmonitor.com

Clean design and helpful suggestions on what a visitor should do next

dainese.com

Would you be scared ?

addons.mozilla.org

Clean, helpful and beautiful

0at.org

Were you looking for a bat holding a balloon?

fi.bemmu.com

Cute anime girl pointing to you that there is nothing you were looking for

newyorker.com

Old-school highway drawing. The road to nowhere

getmefast.com

Just a nice design

action-electronics.com

Warning: they have a webmaster who may be coding their site while drunk

ibiblio.org

A very neat description in all the possible languages

meish.org

Kitty stole your web page…

thedisneyblog.com

Danger, Donald Duck!

current.com

No happy ending on the internet highway. Maybe you didn’t click hard enough?

vimeo.com

No more information available

cityofheroes.com

A very videogame-like design of 404

observer.com

Another black and white old-school drawing

laughingsquid.com

Tentacles “locating a page” in the pool

marksandspencer.com

Suggesting for what you may be looking for

palmbeachpost.com

You got bounced over to this beach

productplanner.com

A green school board, white chalk, 404

psphacks.net

ASCII art

reddit.com

A broke reddit character

scrapblog.com

Pink, beach, girly. Have you lost your way?

crowdspring.com

The site owners feel embarrassed about their errors

vanityfair.com

Diplomacy on the shoestring: blame the third party!

versionsapp.com

Plain and simple

secure.wufoo.com

Dinosaur shouting out “404!”

Yahoo! News

Extremely helpful: if they can’t find what you’re looking for, they redirect you to Yahoo!’s search page



So, after more than ten years, you would think that the 404 error would no longer be an issue. Yet, as we all “Stumble”, build sites, code, and develop applications, bad links still sneak through. Unfortunately, even basic typos can affect website ratings and the quest for quality Search Engine Optimization.

Here are some types of bad links:

Inaccessible Links: Web spiders can’t index these links because they are coded into JavaScript or Flash. If they can’t be found, the search engines can’t index them. Think twice before displaying content this way. Talk your clients out of it altogether if they are asking for SEO and are truly content-oriented.

Also, these links won’t be available to people who need to alter their computer settings to accommodate poor eyesight or other disabilities. Translation software may also be affected by embedded links whose characters are unavailable. Making your site accessible to others is a courtesy that has indexing benefits, as well as good “public relations” for the site’s overall reputation – especially if you are promoting a brand.

Link Polluters: Spammers make comments and create links randomly to various sites to increase their indexing results. This may have very negative consequences if your site is one click away from a porn or warez (illegal software) site.

If you decide to link to other sites without checking them out, SeoMOZ’s ranking factors report says that external links to low quality sites may impact your search engine rankings. Investigate your links – are they related to the message you want to get across? Do they contain good quality content? How do their own links score when you evaluate their rankings and other data? Google states:

“some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

Broken Links: Even minor disappointments (like 404 pages) will drive away potential visitors and customers.  They might even find a competitor because of a typo. Have someone else scan your code and an end-user test and re-test your links.

Think about your print media too. Work closely with your marketing team to ensure that everything is ready. Don’t spend the money on a colour ad and have a typo, broken link, or a URL that is not up and running. Test, test, and test again.

Untrustworthy (Hidden links): Some people have embedded white font text and used other style sheet formatting tricks to position key words or other links behind images and colours. This type of thing will catch up with you. Here’s what Google has to say:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

One Way Ticket to Bad Links: 6 Examples to Avoid

1. A Webmaster/Blogger re-uses a piece of code from the Internet, such as a WordPress plug-in for dynamic menu generation. The links are generated using script (flash).
   Result: Links are invisible to web spiders and all of the pages in the “drill-down” structure do not get indexed.
2. A Webmaster/Blogger puts some external links on their website. The target domain URL expires and gets acquired by spammers.
   Result: Link to a porn or warez site directly from your website!
3. A Webmaster/Blogger adds some links to YouTube, Flickr, etc. The targeted content is then removed because of a copyright infringement.
   Result: 404s
4. A Webmaster/Blogger upgrades a WordPress installation and a plug-in malfunctions, such as a tag generation plug-in.
   Result: Many internal 404s (or even internal server 500s)
5. A Webmaster/Blogger codes a typo or misspells a word in a URL.
   Result: 404s
6. Automated link exchange software is being used at your organization.
   Result: Spam infiltrates the system. The final links page gets more than 100 links and your site gets flagged as a link farm.