Links – they’re one of the fundamentals of Search Engine Optimization. Search engines look at who and what you’re linking to as well as who and what is linking to you… on so many levels.
I’m not going to go into that too much right now. I am going to save you a while lot of time though.
I could go on forever about good links, deep links, canonical links and more. This post, though is about bad links and blacklisted links.
“Broken links”? Well, just what they say – it’s a link to a site or source that no longer exists. Maybe the site address or addressing scheme changed and the address changed. Maybe the other end of the link dropped off the Internet completely.
“Blacklisted Links”? Blacklisted links are links to resources typically identified to be SPAM or in some way malicious.
Maybe there are suspiciously too many sites linking to one source all at once (poor taste in online marketing practices) or the link directs to a site that contains some form or malware or malicious scripting.
Both Broken links and Blacklisted Links can be bad for site reputation and site SEO.
How do you know? Well, there are link-checking services and plugins that can tell you – or you can check out DrLinkChecker.com. Currently in Beta DrLinkChecker.com is a super simple web site that, just by putting in your site address, checks the links on your site to see if they’re valid, broken or blacklisted. From there you can go and edit your site and correct or remove the offending link.
It’s free too! (up to 1,000 links)
Learn more about linking and different forms of links here and see how your site holds up at DrLinkChecker.com
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