Linking is the life blood of most writing on the web. Broken or ‘dead’ links are not only annoying – but they are said to slow down search engine crawlers. I understand that to mean – if your links don’t work properly it is more difficult for search engines to find your site.

So it’s worth spending a bit of time and energy with the subject of links. I included a ‘check your site for broken links’ tool in a previous post (see here). But now I’m delving into the subject in more depth I’ve come across another issue.

If you’re a blogger, you’re generally producing a lot of writing. You need to decide how often you’re going to check for broken links and how you’re going to do this. Ideally, you’re going to try to check your links once you’ve finished writing a piece. Not least because it saves work later on.

But whatever you do, you have very little control over the sites you’re linking to. The best sites are frequently updated but some are taken down or archived and this may result in broken links in your blog posts.

Also, there are quite a number of different explanations as to why links might not be viable. Wiki tells us: “The most common result of a dead link is a 404 error, which indicates that the web server responded, but the specific page could not be found”

Just come across a 404 error. Don’t know what to do about it as I’ve checked the page my article is linking to, and it seems fine. Guess I’m still on some sort of a geeky learning curve. Any ideas people let me know. I’ll think on it and report back…