Greetings Mobile Business Owners!

You all have websites, right? Perhaps you have your own webmasters and/or a department within your company that manages all of those details for you. How about blogs? Checked them lately? Link checked your html/php/asp-based sites lately? Do you know where your links are going? Do you know whose businesses you are unknowingly supporting?

In today’s post I’m going slightly (very slightly) away from the traditional mobile topics to talk about website link verification. Not the most glamorous of subjects for many, but one of crucial and vital importance to a mobile business owner with a web or blog presence of any kind. 

Here is the scenario:

You have a website, and it’s doing great. Really well. People are visiting, linking in, you’re creating content, keywords, doing the whole social media promotion thing, and life seems good. One night, as part of routine maintenance performed in conjunction with some scheduled updates — you run a link check. Suddenly, instead of having hundreds of outbound links you find thousands…or tens of thousands…. of outbound links on your site. Where did these come from? Who is this mystery company stealing all of your traffic and website Page Rank?

Why “link stealing” is such a bad thing

Whatever the technical term, I’ll call this “link stealing.” This nefarious activity impacts a website on several levels:

  • Redirects traffic away from your partners and suppliers
  • Can cause search engine penalties for “link farming” and “link spamming.” Among other search-engine related side effects, excessive non-related links can cause your page ranking to drop, or push you further back in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)
  • Increases the load time of your pages (read:  unhappy visitors clicking away from you, and on to your competitors)
  • Clogs up your web pages with junk, and increases the maintenance overhead
  • Uses valuable bandwidth
  • Deters valuable link partners. This is something little-known by many mobile business owners, but many companies check the back and forward links of their competitors. Potential partners do the same. Imagine a potential link partner checking your back links and finding 10,000+ back links to … shall we say… “unsavory” websites?
  • There are probably many more, but the preceding come immediately to mind

What can you do to clean stolen links from your site?

Use the “search and replace” feature of your blog software or website management / editor tools. Most all modern web and blog management tools have either native search and replace, or the ability to add in “modules” or “plug-ins” to provide this feature.  Use the results of your link checker report to find the culprit links and clean them out using “wildcards” such as “*” Check with your webmaster if unsure how to perform any of the steps mentioned in this article.

NOTE:  Be sure to make backup copies of your website and/or blog before running major search and replace functions. 

Continue the search and replace operations until all offending traces of the link thieves have been removed. Then, run your URL checker again to find out of there are any stolen links still present. Continue the search/replace + rechecking process, until all of your links are the ones you expect to see.

How can you prevent stolen links in the future?

  • Run a link checker at least once a week. Many link checkers will run as background processes (for the nontechnical, this means that they can be set up to run without human intervention). Those that don’t can still be run quickly from a graphical user interface, or command line. The point is not *what* tool you use, but just to use one at least once a week for your entire site. That said, here are some tools that we either use currently, or have used over at MobileBusinessOwners.com:
  • Maintain security controls on your blog and/or website
  • Keep up with patches and security updates
  • Be careful about security levels set for “commenters” and contributors within your blog management software. In some cases, users can gain elevated privileges once they have been granted an account
  • Use a tool such as “ShieldsUp!” to periodically check your site

I hope this can save you time and aggravation in the future. After all, as mobile business owners, we want to spend our time running 

and managing our business, not giving business away to unsavory websites that look to capitalize on our good names and hard-earned effort.

End note:  There are other great reasons to run link link checkers, namely to keep the search spiders, and your users happy as well. 

Link checking is just all around good business on all levels!

Thanks for reading.

Best regards,

Corbin Links, and the MobileBusinessOwners.com team