Broken Links and Google
Google is starting to put much weight on outgoing link validation, specially with the Caffeine update.
Broken links seem to be an important factor now, the more broken links, the lower your site rank will be.
This way, they want to force webmasters to periodically check all links and remove or fix those dead.
There are a few problems:
- a large number of websites are no longer maintained, but they still have valuable information and there is no one to remove the dead links
- some broken links are broken only temporary, you could remove them, then when they are up again, it’s much likely you won’t notice to re-add them
- you could write a short post about something and continue with a link for details, so if the link becomes broken and you have to remove it, your post become useless, with a broken link it still could make some sense, people see you write about something which for some reason is not up anymore
- some sites have so many outgoing links, it’s pretty much impossible to make sure all of them are valid
