Linking and SEO update!

This involves an enhancement we are making to all sites to improve their search weight.  If you are not interested in the particulars, this is NOT a required read.

One of the things that WordPress has always handled poorly, that there has been no solution for, are reporting on links that become broken and controlling whether or not to give “link juice” to a site you are looking for.

We have finally found a tool that lets us manage both!   We are user # 400 for this application called Advance Broken Link Checker – Link Manager.  Maybe not a glamorous name, but broken or poorly formatted links are a huge influence on search weight, and where you show up in search rankings.

If you have an article in a  blog post, that has a link to another article on someone else’s website (like you link to something published by the Wall Street Journal for instance) this is good for SEO.  It used to be bad, but now, as long as the link is what’s called “NO FOLLOW” you are not giving away any of your search weight, and you gain a tiny bit of weight for having a relevant link.

If they move that article, then when someone clicks the link, they get a File Not Found.   A File Not Found (404 error) is devastating for Search Optimization.

This also happens with internal links.  For instance, we might have a link to books but want to get a lift for the search term database, and we change the page to be database-books.  Every link to the old page will break, resulting in a 404 error, and giving your visitor a bad experience, while also denigrating your search value.

From a pure marketing perspective, every time you link to a page outside of your site, you want to open it in a new window, so that you are not inviting people to leave your site, never to find it again.  Internal links from one page on your site to another should always open in the same window.

There’s now 1 tool that makes sure ALL of these things are taken care of.

We have so far implemented it on 5 client sites, and not 1 site didn’t have an error that it fixed!   I am certain that every single site will get some advantage from this tool, and I’m thrilled that someone has finally created a link manager tool that works the way we like to work!

During February, we will be deploying this new tool on all sites, whether or not you are a retainer-based client, to give everyone the benefit.

I would like to publicly thank jannatqualitybacklinks.com for producing this tool.   Bad links, and links not optimized has been among the most tedious problems we have faced in WordPress, and HOF has been looking for a solution like this for years!