Have you checked your outbound links today? Are they all still active?

If not and a link is broken on a popular post then your credibility can be damaged when your visitors try to visit the site that you have recommended and then found that the site does not exist. Worse still, search engines are thought to punish sites that link out to a lot of sites that no longer exist.

So, it is in your best interests to make sure that all of your outbound links are still working. But on a large site, this can be near impossible. For that reason I have installed Broken Link Checker on to my most important blogs.

Its task is quite simple. If there is a link in your blog it regularly checks that the links work. Whether they are links to websites or links in the forms of images, it checks them.

And it has been very useful! It identified invalid image links when I got them wrong (I’d used relative instead of absolute locations, so the link worked on the home page, but not on the post).

But the main thing is the number of links that it has detected as broken. Either through links in gravatars in comments to links in posts, many different links break and can be detected. And for those of my blogs that are involved in sponsored posting, I am surprised at how many of those links break after a short while. Some times, before I even get paid for the posting!

It is quite easy to have a panel on the dashboard that you see when you logon that says if there are any broken links and then you can review them. From there you can decide whether they are now live once more or whether the link should be removed, with a single click of the mouse.

Have a look at the plugin, it is well worth it.