Any web site owners in need of a high quality method to drive traffic should look into a link “stealing” strategy. It’s important to retain as much traffic as possible. The legal link “stealing” strategy is a sure fire way to grab web traffic from people who may be your competition.
This is made possible largely through human error. There are a number of people that tend to link to your web site for one purpose or another. It’s not hard for someone to accidentally put in the wrong URL whenever they are linking to a site. All it takes is one character to be missing and the URL is wrong.
This causes issues whenever visitors are trying to click the links and makes it hard to be reached via search engine. Visitors will click on the URL and won’t be able to reach you, nor will the search engine pick it up.
Finding these broken links should be your first course of action.
One method you can use is Google Webmaster, which is a free device that allows you to add your web site, verify your ownership and use the diagnostic tools to look for “crawl errors.” When you visit this portion of the tool, you’ll be taken to links that direct to your site, including any URLs that are broken.
Once you find the web site with the broken link, you should get in touch with the web administrator of the site. You should always contact first to give them a chance to fix it, especially if the two of you have already had a relationship together. Since they intended to provide the original URL, this fix makes it easier to solve any resulting search engine optimization issues. If you are able to build a relationship with them, you can give them the correct link.
Those who aren’t able to get the contact to change the URL should create their own 301 redirect for the broken link. This way, it won’t be up to someone else to take care of the issue. Since it’s not their problem, other people might not be willing to take care of it and won’t go out of their way to correct the issue. It’s not the most ideal situation, but can definitely help you avoid relying on someone else.
When creating the redirect, make an.htaccess file within your site’s root directory. You can save this file and test the redirection link in your web browser. Another link “stealing” method is to create a custom made 404 error web page. We’ve all seen the 404 error before. This is the page that appears whenever your document isn’t found nd lerts you with text and sometimes an icon. Since these errors happen all the time, web page clients can allow administrators to create their own custom messages in the event someone attempts to access a missing page.
It is absolutely crucial to keep in mind that any time a person uses broken links to your site, you are actively losing traffic. If you have a site that you rely on for business, a monetized blog for instance, this means that you are losing customers and money in the process.
With these types of procedures in place, you don’t have to bother with toiling away at lesser strategies and selling yourself short in the process. Many people put all of their efforts and energy into attempting to create a lot of search engine optimization content, to the point of oversaturating their web sites with needless content. Those that do this run the risk of running people away by posting irrelevant information packed with keywords that don’t advance the needs of the site. By taking advantage of high quality techniques, you are putting more power in your hands as opposed to leaving the techniques to chance.
This manner of “stealing” links will give you the opportunity keep a measure of control in your hands that you didn’t previously have. You actually have the chance to correct the mistakes that people made and use their errors to your advantage. Whether they fix it for you or not, with this method, there’s no reason for you to ever have to have broken links leading to you again. Take advantage of the tools in front of you and make sure that you are constantly promoting and driving traffic to your site.
Charles Dearing has extensive experience in website optimization. His articles mainly appear web development blogs. For more information on SEO Packages visit the website of SEO Works.
About Josh Nadeau
I am absolutely using this. I can generate traffic with other people’s mistake. This is awesome.