May

...for some time now it has been important for your web site's ranking to have relevant incoming links to your site  ...over time, the process of 'exchanging' links with other relevant web sites, referred to as "reciprocal linking", has the potential to grow into a large number of links on your site  ...ensuring that all of the links you have posted on your website are "current" and "working" is extremely important  ...why is this important? - while there are a number of reasons, there are two main reasons I'd like to address here in this article

...first, particularly important if you provide a web-based service and/or sell/deliver a product through your website, "broken" links can very quickly adversely affect your site visitor's confidence in your web site's ability to deliver what's promised and to do so in a secure manner  ...second, because popular search engines, like Google, use link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that lead to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy, "broken" links will adversely affect your web site's ranking as your site can potentially be deemed to be "out of date"  ...fortunately, today, keeping up with the validity of the links you have posted on your site is a much less daunting task than it once was

...just as it is important to ensure the validity of "external" links (links to and/or from "other" websites) you have posted on your site, so is it important to ensure that all of the "internal" links that navigate your site visitors throughout your website are working and most importantly "correct" as well  ...as it is common to add new content, move and/or reorganize your site content etc., this can often lead to renaming pages and/or moving site files into sub-folders on your server towards better organizing your site content  ...many of these types of site maintenance tasks will then change the "link path" to the updated and/or reorganized content - thereby "breaking" a link you may have assigned somewhere on your site designed to access this content

...fortunately, many of the web development tools utilized today for performing site maintenance will 'warn' you when you attempt to move and/or rename a web page and there are other pages that link to the page you are changing  ...most will also help with automatically updating these links - but only if you are using these tools correctly - and not all development tools provide this assistance  ...so, it is always a good practice to review your site navigation and site-wide text and image links, making note of what other areas of your site are linking to the content you are updating and then remember to update those links when you are finished with your individual content updates as necessary

...if you 'do' change the name of a page, or you relocate a page to a different directory on your web hosting server and there are external websites that link to this content, remember to notify these other websites so as not to lose this incoming link to your site - as incoming external links are one of the most important factors relating to your web site's ranking  ...while search engines periodically visit, scan and index your website content, it may take some time for an old site link to be removed from the various search engine result listings  ...many of the search engines provide ways for you to submit outdated page links to your site for removal, but this can be a time-consuming task, particularly if your site has been active for some time and could now be listed with a large number of different search engines

...for this reason, some experts have recommended that if you decide to change, move or remove a page from your site structure, that you leave the page in it's current location, with its existing name, and simply change the code of the page so as to re-direct the visitor to the page where the current content now lives - thereby leaving all external, as well as internal, links to the original page in tact and active  ...while this practice will work, there are varying opinions as to whether this practice is a good idea or not - as it can not only lead to your site being cluttered with many extra pages, but, a site containing too many "re-direct" pages can also be deemed as a site with questionable intent by many search engines

...if you are unsure whether all of your internal site links are working correctly and/or you have a large number of links to external websites, there are many free online services available for checking your web site's pages  ...as with many online services, I recommend caution, as unfortunately many "free" website services may be scanning your site with malicious intent; phishing for email address, looking for security vulnerabilities, etc.  ...for checking the links and structure of your web site, I recommend sticking with well known sites such as the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) link validator which can be found at: http://validator.w3.org/checklink ...there are also other various tools and valuable resources at their main web site located at: http://www.w3.org/

...if anyone would like to know more about the types of services I can provide, you can learn more by visiting my web site at: http://www.evadware.com ...I would also be happy to set up a phone call with anyone interested in exploring how I might be of assistance - appointments can be requested through the "Request Info" page at the site, or by dropping me an email here at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

best to all!

:-)

evad