Broken Outbound Links
Although site updates and migrations are part of your website life cycle, broken links can be a significant cause of lost visitors, especially if your site is not being updated on a regular basis. How you handle broken links, or 404 errors, is important both from the human visitor’s perspective and from the web spider’s perspective.
In this section, we will focus on outbound links. We view broken links as an external factor because some or all of the broken links on a page worked at some point.
Broken links can say a lot about someone’s website. Many broken links on a site could be interpreted in the wrong way. Search engines could perceive the website as having been abandoned, and will remove it from their indexes. Two scenarios can cause broken links: old link references and invalid link references.
Old link references occur when sites linking to your site have not updated their links. This can happen if you decide to change your website’s pages without informing your referral sites. This will, of course, produce 404 errors to anyone clicking on these referral links. This situation will look bad on your website and on the referrer sites, since they have not updated their links.
Erroneous link references refer to sloppy coding, such as when your links are pointing to misspelled documents which do not exist. For all intents and purposes, pages resulting in server errors can also be interpreted as broken links as they are not the intended result.
Handling Broken ...
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