From the Desk of Janet Barclay

If your work slows down in the summer, it may be the ideal time to work on projects you couldn’t fit into your schedule earlier in the year, as suggested in my article Six Ways to Make the Most of Summer Downtime. One such project is checking your website for broken links. If your website visitors click on links only to find that the sites or pages no longer exist, they may feel that it’s not worth sticking around to check out the rest of your site. There are a number of tools that will automate the process of locating broken links, but sometimes that is not enough. For example, a link that leads to a "Page Not Found" will most likely register as a broken link, but if it leads to an Error Page, your link checker may not recognize that as a dead link.

Yesterday Scott was working on a client project that required him to collect some information from her website. When he clicked on one of links to an external website, he discovered that the target site had been hijacked, so instead of bringing up someone’s blog, it brought up a porn site. Even worse, if he clicked on the Back button, instead of returning to our client’s site, it went to yet another porn site. We immediately deleted the link from the site, but of course we have no way of knowing how long it was like that. Not only did this situation present a risk of seriously offending our client’s website visitors, it could have damaged her search engine positioning, as Google’s Webmaster Guidelines clearly state that your ranking may be adversely affected by links to "bad neighbourhoods."

If you thought that checking your links was a low priority task, think again! You need to make time for this project, especially if you have a lot of outgoing links. And if you can’t fit it into your schedule, or you just don’t enjoy that type of work, maybe you need an Organized Assistant!