Arsham Mirshah writes:

Ezine is awesome because it has that automated system where it checks for broken links. The Article Diagnostic Center is easy to use – which is important because broken links are bad news bears!

Having a broken link doesn’t JUST prevent you from getting that free traffic, but it can also hurts your search engine rankings, as well as tarnish your name as an author (someone might think: “this persons website link is broken, they are not professional”).

Thanks for this post Penny!

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Furniture KMP writes:

Thanks for this post.

Your service is great, We got a lot of visits from the articles we put on EzineArticles.com

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Kathryn Merrow - The Pain Relief Coach writes:

I agree fully with Arsham! This is an extremely useful and easy to use feature and gotta tell you: You make me so happy!

Thank you for making this happen and for telling us about it.

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Madeleine Innocent writes:

A wonderful tool and great service. Thanks.

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Wendy Streater writes:

Your diagnostic tool is a great idea. I recently had a site down and found out when you informed me of a couple of broken links. Thanks for the great service!

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PAUL FRIAR writes:

I REALLY THINK EzineArticles IS AMAZING. IVE HEARD ALL ABOUT THE AMOUNT OF TRAFFIC THAT CAN BE GENERATED FROM ARTICLE SUBMISSION, BUT I HAVE TO AGREE THAT LINKS MUST BE CHECKED AUTOMATICALLY, AS A BROKEN LINK IS NO LINK AT ALL!
I’M DEFINITELY GOING TO USE EZINE TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO MY WEBSITE

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Anthony Antolics writes:

Thank you for this post.
Being able to check link validity with one simple click is a great diagnostic tool.

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Jess writes:

I clicked the link as valid but you dead linked it anyway.
Not sure why.
But the idea is good, we want our links to work for sure.
Thanks for providing the platform.

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Penny, Managing Editor writes:

Jess,

We send 4 email notifications before we unlink. If you find that we keep sending you a notification and you have already validated the link, let us know, there may be an underlying issue that either you or we can address.

I do see that we sent you the notifications, but I don’t see where you validated the link.

November 11, 2009 at 11:45 AM

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Tatiana Bandurina writes:

The EzineArticles have really incredible team!
Thank you for wonderful service!

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Diana Kipka writes:

Excellent tool and so easy to use…no excuses now for maintaining deadlinks LOL

Cheers
Diana

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------------- writes:

The Broken link checker is very useful especially if you are referencing sites that are totally out of your control.
Is it possible for an author to change the links to a different or better source after the article is published?

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Penny, Managing Editor writes:

Yes it is! Please do so! You can edit your article and change the links and resubmit it for review.

November 11, 2009 at 11:56 AM

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Geoff writes:

The reminder is well worthwhile. The feature to check links in the “Article Diagnostic Center” is very useful, thanks.

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Lance is in the House! writes:

Boy, I am blown away that I have some so many dead links in my articles, some with more than one dead link in the same article, over 375 that need fixing. Done with 153, it’s taken 6-hours, but well worth my time. What totally blows me away is the type of sites that had those links. You see, I write a lot of science articles, political articles, I like aerospace designs, and trying to provide solutions to the world in our think tank.

I’d like to point out an interesting observation. Many of the sites you’d think would always have their links up don’t including, much of the information is simply gone, really trust worthy sites like:

FEMA
White House
NASA
USDA
SEC

And so many organizations and companies too, completely gone, this recession really wiped out a number of top notched companies, brand names, organizations, etc. It’s totally amazing. Now my articles span back to 2005, but I am blown away by all the dead links. Many were to a website bulletin board I shut down due to sploggers, but the rest are all from sites, I’d expect to be there forever.

Moral of the story and my advice to authors. Cite the work you wish to at the bottom of an article if you feel it’s necessary, but not the website. And explain what it is you noted at the website, do not try to link to it. You may think a government site will always be there; BULL. I can tell you I am amazed at all the missing information and links. It’s like “yes the Internet is expanding with new sites, blogs, etc.” but, lots of stuff is leaving every day, friggin vanished in fact.

So, do not link unless you have too, trust me on this, I just learned the hard way. This is a lot of work, I am going to have 3-days worth of work into just fixing all these by the time I am done. Unbelievable, I’d have never thought NASA would kill web pages, or FEMA, or the USDA? Crazy.

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

Excellent point Lance!

In fact, I’m going to share right now a link to your comment with our 39,000+ twitter peeps as there are others who can learn from this important insight.

November 11, 2009 at 8:36 AM

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Christopher M. Knight writes:

All,

Glad you like this feature as we spent well over a year refining and improving, rewriting it from scratch a few times and now we dedicate a lot of server/software resources to this feature in order to help both our end-users from not being disappointed to find a dead link and our members who might have content that isn’t working for them any more due to a dead link.

At one point we had over 200,000 dead links. That’s crazy! …but no more. This act is being cleaned up thanks to the hard work of good members like you and smart engineering from our developers who put thousands of hours into this project.

Uniquely we have over 40,000 dead links left to get fixed and about 1800 a day are being auto-unlinked because they’ve hit day 35 with no activity.

For those editing articles because of dead links, know we’ll be giving those articles priority today and this week to get them back live.

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Jean Tracy, MSS writes:

None of us want dead links. But if we’ve written a lot of articles and keep moving forward in our work without looking behind, how would we know we had dead links?

This process is so easy. Thank you Chris and Penny.

I’m very grateful for all you do for us.

Jean

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Henrik Blunck - Denmark writes:

The unlinking procedure is good, and certainly beneficial for SEO-purposes.

Nice service, and truly worthwhile that we can rely upon computers to check these things. For some, going through numerous articles would take a very long time.

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Mel Lyttle writes:

Definitely a great way of providing extra value to all your writers, really appreciate it, great idea, thanks

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HealthMindSpirit writes:

This article is good reminder of keeping on top of broken links,

and to do it now, do not leave the leaks dangling, as they are soon forgotten,

maybe we get lazy and leave it,
thank you for the reminder.

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edward writes:

this post is important and very useful, I’ve got to share it with my fellow article users! a dead link is not just a corpse, but also pollute the article and the site it is supposed to link. The readers would think the author is not capable and the publisher is not longer upgrading the account.

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