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Link Rot: The Silent Website Killer
By: Jim Conley II, MerchantSeek.com

Link rot invades more websites than you can shake a stick at.
It shows visitors that maintenance is not very high on your list
of priorities. This could be the reason why so many of your
visitors slip through the cracks to other websites.

It's time to crack down on link rot. I would suggest using a link
checking service like LinkGuard ( http://www.linkguard.com )
to check your site for broken links every week. With
LinkGuard you can set when you want it to check your site and
have the results e-mailed to you.

But there may be occasions where you can't catch link rot right
away. Don't fret, there are ways you can keep visitors on your
site when these situations pop up. Adding a few lines to the
.htaccess file on your web server can route your visitors who
would otherwise go to an error page to a custom error page that
you've developed just for these types of situations.

But before I get into this, let me say that it would be best for
someone who is familiar with the .htaccess file to be the one
who makes the changes to it, or else you may make a deadly
mistake. I can certainly vouch for a mistake I made a few
weeks ago, and as a result it completely shut down
MerchantSeek for 15 minutes. Thanks to Adam, my
programmer. He was able to get things back up before serious
damage was done.

First, you need to develop at least two web pages, one for 404
errors and another for 500 errors. For an example of what I
have for MerchantSeek go to
http://www.merchantseek.com/500.htm and
http://www.merchantseek.com/404.htm After you have these
pages done, upload them to your server. Next, download your
.htaccess file to your computer, open it up with Notepad and
add these following lines:

NOTE: For this example I used the filenames 404.htm and
500.htm for custom error pages I developed. Whatever you
name yours is what you will enter into the lines below.

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/404.htm
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.yourdomain.com/500.htm

After inserting these lines into your .htaccess file, upload it in
ASCII format to your web server.

Some of you might not find your .htaccess file on your server
to start with. That's OK, it's hidden, just open up Notepad and
enter in the lines above and save as .htaccess. If Notepad adds
a .txt to the end of the file, be sure to remove it before
uploading to your web server.

Lastly, test the results by trying to access a page on your site
that doesn't exist. You should be routed to your custom 404
error page.

While this tactic won't gain you a lot of traffic, it will keep the
traffic that you are getting.

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Jim Conley II is the CEO/Founder of MerchantSeek. MerchantSeek allows merchants from around the world to search FREE for a Merchant Account Provider that best fits their businesses needs and budget. Visit us at http://www.merchantseek.com/