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.

Digg This
Reddit This
Stumble Now!
Buzz This
Vote on DZone
Share on Facebook
Bookmark this on Delicious
Kick It on DotNetKicks.com
Shout it
Share on LinkedIn
Bookmark this on Technorati
Post on Twitter
Google Buzz (aka. Google Reader)

If you want to keep up with our latest posts, just follow us on our RSS feed, join our weekly newsletter or follow us over at Twitter. Please do join in - it is totally free and only the best posts are passed to you!

Also, leave a comment below. We are a 'DoFollow' blog, so it is well worth your time. Thanks for calling in.

Similar Articles You Might Like To Read:
    How Might Outbound Links Possess Search Engine Power? Why might an outbound link on a search engine tempt them to send you more visitors? Could these be a...
    Not Winning The Technorati Battle I still have not cracked the brainteaser – just how do you become listed on Technorati? To date I have...
    Do Outbound Links Bestow Search Engine Authority? This is a theory that I keep coming back to time and time again – it looks to me as...
    Your Weekly Blogging Tasks Once every week you should sign on to your blog, forget about posting and do some basic administration on the...
    Finding The Best Value Out of Paid Links If you are buying links, then what is the best value? Are you paying a lot of bloggers to talk...
    Earning Review – In Post Links InPostLinks is one of the many available sponsored posting systems on the market. But what does it offer to the...
    Why Do We Build Links And The Reasons Articles Assist? Most of the weight as to what terms are significant to your site come not from what you say on...
    Essential Plugins For Your Blog Some plugins perform functions that useful that they, or equivalent plugins, really should be used on every blog. Here is...
    Finding Do-Follow Blogs To Comment On Here is an excellent tool from Google that I have just stumbled across in another website – a search just...
    The 7 Keys To A Successful Sponsored Blog How can you increase the value of your blog to get the maximum income through sponsored posting? What do you...