Something which constantly amazes me is how quickly the links on a web site go out of date. This is especially true of external links, but can also occur with internal links and graphics.
It's easy enough to understand why external links can be difficult to maintain. It's very simple - they are not under your control. Web sites come and go quickly on the internet. Sometimes sites disappear because the webmaster moved, lost interest or died. Occasionally they are removed by their ISP for legal or ethical reasons. Once in a while a web site is simply moved to a different host.
In addition, webmasters (at least the good ones) are always working on their sites, creating new pages, modifying old ones and moving things around. The best web sites on the internet are constantly changing - almost fluid in their design.
So what happens is you link to a large number of pages all over the web and a few of those each month are deleted, moved or unavailable for whatever reason. The result is your visitors click on links and get the dreaded 404 error. What this does is lowers your visitors confidence in you and your products - after all, if you cannot even keep your links you to date ...
More insidious than broken external links are links within your own website which do not work. These can be graphics, videos, sound, web pages or just about anything else.
Several years ago when I was just starting out my opinion was that all web sites must keep their internal links up-to-date. Any webmaster who had broken internal links didn't know his stuff and was an amateur.
Now that I've been webmaster for a large website (Internet Tips And Secrets has over 1,400 pages and thousands of images and other files) I've softened my viewpoint. It's difficult to create a quality web site, much less maintain it and keep it up-to-date all of the time.
I guess my point is the ideal is to have no broken links at all, but reality indicates that occasionally you will find one or two.
Internal links are the easiest to handle. I've found that my links typically get broken not when I initially upload the pages - it's when I make changes. The following recommendations will handle just about everything.
External links are a bit more difficult.
This is by far one of the best things that you can do to help with link rot. Create a custom 404 error page. This will also catch the problem of people mis-typing your URLs, as well as a problem with some search engine spiders that I've encountered lately. It seems that many spiders have bugs and create invalid URLs. A custom 404 error page will handily catch these errors.
What happens with a custom 404 error page is simple. An incorrect URL is typed. Instead of sending the 404 error back to the browser or to your host's default 404 error page, your own page can be displayed. On this page you can apologize for the error and get your visitor back to where he belongs by offering him search capability or a menu or whatever.
Another example is at Cool404. Reload a few times to get the idea.
What I like to do in addition is to send an email back to myself with a CGI routine. This way I can fix those nasty errors quickly without waiting to check out my server logs.
Broken links are an issue on all web sites. In fact, a large number of dead links is a sign that a site is not being maintained or is abandoned. In fact, many search engines will penalize a site in their rankings if they find too many broken links. If you want to look professional, then check your links regularly.
Unless otherwise noted, all photos and text is Copyright © Richard G Lowe, Jr.