Link Checking and Help From Your Users

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You may be unaware that a link you have on your site may be incorrect or point to the wrong destination. With all of the activity a web content administrator may have in a given day, how much time do they have to double check a link? While they should make it standard practice, sometime errors slip through.

Yet broken links can create frustration, confusion and in some cases, lost revenue. That's why link-checking is so important, and worth the time to double check for accuracy.

Sometimes, however, those broken links make it through. I ran into one today within the global navigation of the St. Louis Post Dispatch / St. Louis Today. It took me to a page that stated:
If you look closely, not only does it indicate you've reached a page not found, but you have some options (my comments in italic):

• Try our new and improved search
• Retype the address (as if you knew what the link URL was)
  
• Go back to the previous page (please attempt to make the same mistake again)
  
• Return to the home page (maybe I'll forget why I clicked on the link and find something else)
  
• Search our archives (let me do something completely irrelevant)
  
• Good luck (really? Am I on my own now?)
  

Although the graphic says it was "my bad" the solutions all indicate as if it was your bad. When, in this instance after trying a multitude of ways to reach the linked section, I realized they had a bad link in their global nav.

So how would they know about this? Unless they were navigating the site themselves, it may take hours or even days before they discover the problem.

For me I would recommend adding one more link within their "oops" page that says, "report a bad link?" Maybe there actually is a bad link, so why not give your users a way to tell you about it? My guess is that most of the time users will try to help a site and report a problem. Besides, it's a quick and easy way to enlist the help of your audience, who is probably on your site more than you are.

As with anything, considering all the options and conveniences from a user's perspective can only make the web experience better, and more productive for all.

© 2011 Bob Chernet - View all of Bob's articles at: Bob Chernet's Marketing Best Practices . Reproduction of Bob Chernet's Marketing Insights in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.