Dead links refer to the links that are not active in a website. The dead links do not have any relevant contents but they are still active in the search engine database. Whenever the search engine gets a query related to the dead link that is still active in the search engine index, it caches the particular link and brings it into the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Thus the entire effort of the search engine in dragging your page will become futile. The loss, of course, is for your website.

Every website needs updating, deleting, or modifying certain links or its contents. At the same time, it is important to update the search engine index accordingly, or else change the contents of the website in the way acceptable to the earlier link that you had represented to the search engine. Never sacrifice your links that are getting proper displays through the search engines.

There is a method to find out how many links exist in the search engine database. Go to the search engine page and type the host name of your website followed by colon and then the domain name (host name: domain name) and find out the filenames of the links that are displayed by the search engines. These are the links that are still active in the particular search engine. The filenames of these can be identified by looking at the bottom of the browser while moving the cursor over these links. Now verify whether your website directory still contains these file names. If it does not, immediately update your directory by creating new web pages and giving them the exact filenames as displayed by the search engine crawlers.

Another way to test the existence of a dead link is to examine your server logos and find the page requests that returned the message “file not found”. Using this method, you can not only identify the particular web page that does not exist in the server, but also analyze the traffic of the page. For example, if the result of the above analysis yielded 30 “page not found” requests a day, then you can make sure that the particular page is of high potential and can immediately revitalize it.

Another variant of dead links is the links associated with the link exchange program. If your website is filled with irrelevant links, then it would be considered as a ‘link farm’ and will be ignored by the search engines. Therefore, links that do not contribute much to your website should be immediately removed from it, in order to regain the lost traffic of your website. These links are labeled ‘dead’ because of the poor quality of the contents in it.

Before submitting your link to any directory, analyze the traffic flow of other similar sites in it. Do not end up paying hefty amount to a group of directories that do not yield any results. Rather you should focus on the most fruitful directories that are capable of giving your website the best traffic.

Internal links as well as the inbound and outbound links play an important role in deciding the traffic of a website, and so you need to ensure that all these links are always ‘live’.

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