Web Development

Keep Google Happy

October 31, 2008 October 31, 2008 If you’ve had a website long enough, maintaining all of the links, both internal and external, can be a real hassle. Eventually, your site will become a victim of link rot: when an external site you linked to has either moved their content or went down altogether. Being vigilant about link rot is pretty important, especially when it comes to your Google ranking. Bogus inbound and outbound links can be a detriment to your ranking and that’s not a good thing. Luckily, there are some tools you can use to help you get rid of link rot. First of all, there are Google’s Webmaster tools. When Google crawls your site it lists broken links. You can click on a link to see which pages had the destination link on them and what link is actually broken. You’ll frequently notice that a lot of these links are not internal links, but links to other sites, blogs or social networks. You may have to do additional link cleanups outside of your own website to fix these. Secondly, there’s a tool called Xenu’s Link Sleuth, which you can download for free. You can run Xenu on your own site and it will check every single link and run a report for you. The report indicates broken links, redirected URLs, broken local-links, orphan files and statistics. It’s a very thorough tool that catches common link errors. What’s nice about the report is that you can see all of the affected pages and the broken link on each. This makes it fairly easy to find broken links and fix them. Finally, if you have Dreamweaver, you can always use its built-in tools for checking links sitewide. The report is less elegant than the other solutions I've mentioned, but at least it will help get you started. Site maintenance is really important. And keeping your Google ranking high is even more so. Regularly run reports on your site and check your ranking to ensure best site performance.