This past weekend I was at a meetup and was talking to my friend Rob Adler about how I created this search engine optimized site, it’s getting traffic and yet i’m making NOTHING on it because no one is clicking the links. After I explained to him how tha page was laid out he said it made no sense and asked me to pull up the page. We did and discovered that all of the links were broken. All 10,000+ of them.
Now, to give you guys a tip like, make sure your links work is pretty obvious and barely worth a blog post BUT MAKE SURE YOUR LINKS WORK! Often times we have so much going on that we forget the most simplest things and lose money because of it. It took a second set of eyes to realize such an obvious problem (the good news is that the day after we diagnosed and fixed this, the site started making sales).
There are various tools out there that you can use to crawl your sites on a regular basis and make sure that your links are working properly. One tool is called Xenu. Since it’s free, it’s worth checking out.
Do you have any tools you can recommend to other AdHustler.com readers? Sound off in the comments 🙂
Doh. That sucks. Glad you guys were able to fix it.
I normally use this: http://validator.w3.org/checklink It’s web-based, doesn’t require a download and therefore Mac compatible (unlike the Xenu).
ugh. “The Xenu”. Terrible engrish today.
I would also like to add that if you use wordpress there is a plugin called Broken-Link-Checker that automatically crawls your blog and notify you about the broken urls.
i’ve had bad experiences trying to get the w3 link validator to work on a site with 100,000+ links. xenu is perfect because its simple and it gets the job done.
10,000 links broken? That is quite a few links.
Thanks for the post man! Love it. I hate it when my links are broken
I heard Rob Adler is a smarty pants. I wonder why he’s not in your blogroll. 🙂
I got a software that does it all. 😉
Well, this is definitely an useful post, thanks!
I’ve checked my blog, only 27 broken links, not that much at all…
still I will be fixing it.
I heard Rob Adler hasn’t updated his blog in months. If you wanna be on the blogroll you gotta stay current 🙂
At least it was an organic site, hate when that shit happens when you’re buying traffic.
I’d be SCREWED without Roboform.
Ouch! Good thing you weren’t paying for that traffic.
As someone mentioned already, for WP sites, there’s the handy broken-link-checker plugin. It’s all I use since, so far, my sites are all WP.
This happens does sometimes when rushing through to make the changes in the code.
second set of eyes brings up a good point. always good to have a crew around to help with things.
Sigh. Fine I’ll post more.