What is Link Rot?

Basically it occurs when external sites or your merchant (if you’re an affiliate) changes the links in their system so your links produce a 404 (page not found error). I started looking at my test data from the recent PageRank Update and noticed that a high percentage of sites that had a drop in PageRank, also had lots of dead links throughout their site.

Was this the main cause of the drop? Was it partial? I don’t know. Regardless, it is always a good idea to “keep a good house” which includes checking your links at least on a quarterly basis.

So, if you haven’t checked your links in a couple months, do it now. Here is what you do:

1) Search for “Xenu” in Google.
2) It should be the first site listed.
3) Click the link to go to the site.
4) Click “download” and then install the program.
5) Do a complete internal and external link check.
6) I like to view the report for each page.
7) Fix all the dead links (both internal and external).
8 ) If you had ten or more internal pages with problems, rerun your Google XML Sitemap

That’s it. It should take you about 1-2 hours to run the report and fix the main broken links. The benefits will be huge for you.

Get this done first thing and I will have more steps for you to improve your site coming.