dead_man tagged: ,

Blog Challenge 27: Dealing With the Dead

Posted by in 31DBBB, Blogging, Internet


This post is part of my ongoing series based upon the eBook 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. To read all of my other posts on the subject, check out the 31DBBB category. For more on the book itself, visit ProBlogger.

This blog began on the AOL Journals platform, which means that its address was completely different from what it is now. Likewise, most of the blogs I linked to at the time also had an address that was part of AOL’s platform.

A couple of years ago, AOL finally deleted the final remnants of its journaling community.

This means that all of those links to various blogs and articles from the earliest days of this blog are dead: they point to an error page.

That’s a turnoff to most readers. If they’re going to take the time to click a link to go further into your blog (or elsewhere in the blogosphere), the last thing they want is to be given an error page.

While no blogger can know how long every page he may link to will be valid (or when one gets taken down), it’s important to deal with dead links once you discover them.

There are a couple of ways to deal with them: You can substitute a similar link that will serve the original destination’s purpose, or you can simply delete the link so that it can’t be clicked.

I’m in the process of going through dead links that have been spotted by a website called W3C Link Checker. There were several surprises there, but most that turned up were ones that I figured would appear as dead links, but that I just hadn’t had the time to track down.

This still takes time: you still have to find the links that it finds to be dead, but at least you know what to look for. That in itself cuts the amount of time needed to take care of these dead links.

At one point, there was a plugin that did this, but I can’t find the one I once saw. If I do, I’ll let you know.

Your Turn:
Have you ever done a search for dead links on your blog? What are you more likely to do if you find one: delete the post, delete the link, or find something similar to link to in the dead link’s place?