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.

Analyze your websites’ topology

Check who you really are linking to (we’ve written a great article on website topology analysis before). You should know that website’s structure matters in many ways: first, you want your visitor to be able to find and visit the pages he is looking for and second, you want search engines to know what the most important pages on your site are.

Use powerful and fast filters to condense and analyze web crawl results

Data filters gather a wide range of things: document types, source/destination paths, followed/nofollowed links, link types and more. Take a quick look at the screenshot below.

Filters can be saved for later use. And you can also share the filtered report with your colleagues or clients with a single click.

And by the way: size does not matter. You can crawl any size website with LinkAider and analyze a site of thousands of pages in a matter of seconds (this is a big advantage when compared to desktop tools. If you don’t believe us try sorting ten thousand lines in Excel or your favorite desktop link analysis software).

Check if you have dead ends on your site’s navigation path

You can see if you have pages with 0 outgoing links right in the site crawl summary report. Funny thing is that pages like this appear on so many sites. Pages with zero links give your users no opportunities. Thank god if your user came to such a page from somewhere on your site. Hitting “back” will bring him to the page he visited before. But if such user came from the search results – “back” button will lead him away from your site (and sometimes forever).

Your pages’ load time is important!

In a recent interview Google’s Engineer Matt Cutts stated that page load time will be a huge factor in seo starting in 2010. And according to eMarketer research 16% of people leave the page if it loads longer than 10 seconds and only every second person will wait more than 15 seconds. Also pages bigger than 150 kb sometimes (!) are not fully cached by search engines.

The good thing is that you can see slowest pages report in LinkAider. There is no need to check your site page by page with other tools – now you can get slow page report for the whole site.

Make your competitors link to you

Crawling your competitors site can reveal many hidden gems that you can use to improve your performance in search results. Here is a quick tip: find your competitors broken links and buy expired domains. You can export broken link report into an Excel file and start shopping. Don’t give up if you see that domain is not available at your favorite domain name registrar. The second place to check is the auctions. Take a peek at Sedo and the likes. Sometimes you can get a great domain name for a small $70 fee.

Take care of your duplicate content

Last but not least. Having duplicate content on your website often confuses your visitors and search engines. And you can find duplicate pages with ease with LinkAider.

So if you are ready – follow this link to signup for free. We promise, you’ll instantly find LinkAider extremely valuable for your seo campaigns.

We have received a bunch of great testimonials already and LinkAider is free to try, but let’s take a peek what LinkAider is capable of and how it can help you do your work (you can check all the shared reports for free, no signup required).

Our blog readers can see one theme come up on our blog from time to time: it’s broken link check. Despite the fact that LinkAider started as a broken link check tool its functionality is not limited to that. Let’s take a look:

Broken link report for code.msdn.microsoft.com

Msdn is a great resource for the developers. There you can find the latest (and the oldest, too) Microsft’s API documentations, code samples and tutorials. Being the one most trusted/official Microsoft documentation site it has only 376 broken links. 376 is really a small number and we should admit that Microsoft does a pretty good job keeping its site up to date.

Crawl report for 37signals

37signals is a famous web software company. The company is run by the web2.0 celebrities Jason Fred and David Heinemeier Hansson (the original developer of Ruby on Rails). You can find their blog at http://37signals.com/svn which is fun and inspiring to read. Since they are blogging for such a long time, no wonder they have many broken links (it is hard to keep up with many changes on the internet and it is not their primary business goal to keep their blog very clean).

Wonder what are the top things running through Jason’s head (we couldn’t keep ourselves from posting st. Jason’s picture here:) )? Perhaps the most linked hosts report may give you a clue:

And you can check the whole report here.

Smashingmagazine broken link report

Smashingmagazine is one of the greatest internet design/development sources. They write great tutorials themselves as well as post many links to great internet resources. You can see that they have more than 370 thousand links on their site at the moment. Writing lengthy tutorials and receiving a lot of feedback often produces big pages, however it is often worth to wait for a couple of seconds for their new great article to load.

Problogger link report

Problogger.net is one more internet celebrity we are huge fans of. Problogger.net is written by Darren Rowse with the main goal to educate other bloggers in how to blog and earn from what they are doing. This site has more than 6 million links at the moment. Let us spell that one more time: it has more than six million links with an average of 162 links per page. You should see this yourselves (check how fast LinkAider is organizing large amounts of data!).

If you like how LinkAider reports look like and what LinkAider does, signup now for free!

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.

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.