[thelist] FW: Link Rot

Luther, Ron Ron.Luther at hp.com
Thu Aug 13 13:52:24 CDT 2009


Brady Mitchell noted:

>>I like the idea, but its worth noting that this would significantly
>>impact the seo value of links on your site. If it's a tool or internal
>>site that's obviously not an issue, but for a public-facing website it
>>would be.


Hi Brady,

Excellent observation!  (I spend most of my time naval gazing on internal systems and miss external considerations like that.)

I'm not sure *anything* would help seo if you need to rewrite links in an existing large scale content system, so that could well be a barrier to entry for this idea.  I'll think about it ... but I would be more than happy to swipe any cool ideas anybody else has on that front.

I do, however, have a possible work around for the 'starting from scratch' situation ...

Suppose we design our homegrown 'tiny' application to change current links from "http://example.com" to shiny new (and improved!) links like "http://BigRon/example.com".  It's not any shorter, so the 'tinyurl' designation is a bit misleading in that regard.  But that's not the value add here.  The important part here is getting all of those links in a table we can test from.  And this still fits that bill.

Moreover, since we're not changing file names from things like 'Les_Paul.jpg' [1] to things like '6XiKk3.jpg' it shouldn't impact any 'intelligence' or seo value built into the file name ... right? ... and it may even keep certain folks happy on the CamelCase and capitalization front.



>>I'm working on something similar and looking forward to the automated 
>>link checks. In my case I'm planning to disable any links that are
>>broken and create a broken links report.

How fun!  Great minds abend in the same hexdump, eh?  It must be a winner then!


Thanks,
RonL.

[1] Sorry to hear that he passed away today.




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