Post photo: Internet presence | © Gerd Altmann on Pixabay
I recently read Henning Uhle the word "miserly“ (in a blog post from October 1.10.2015st, XNUMX) and this gave me a bit to think about, because the term “left sling’ (Example post from February 1.2.2014st, XNUMX), which among other things led to many bloggers removing their own blogrolls in order not to fall out of favor with Google.
And if you follow the almost religious Search Engine Optimization (SEO) movement, then the Handling of own hyperlinks a very special science. In any case, SEO has led to the fact that almost every website operator now pays attention to how and with what they link their own websites. In addition, the state pointed out that not every link was legal. Since that time, most websites have had "legal information" that more or less informs that the website operator can neither do anything nor take responsibility for the content of the linked pages.
With that alone, the Internet was regulated and has certainly lost its charm. And to this day, hardly any website operator really knows how best to deal with hyperlinks to external sites - but in any case this has helped the "SEO scientists" to a lucrative market.
In any case, it still helps to place links on your own pages, especially to make it easier for the countless robots to find their way around the website. To this day I have not been able to find out whether the readers also use these internal links. To complicate things a bit, there are also follow and nofollow links. This is only briefly mentioned here, I will not go into it further.
The reciprocal links that are so important and interesting for the Internet have certainly decreased overall and I have also taken most of my hyperlink collections offline again - but only because I could no longer keep them up to date and the resulting "dead" link collections are just useless. With more than 1 blog posts of my own on this blog, I find it quite difficult to keep the links posted here up to date — although I now even rely on the help of a corresponding plugin.
And this now leads to my very own reason why I am stingy with links to other websites, because as soon as these links are set, the linked website or at least the page linked there no longer exists, and my readers — but especially the robots — receive an "Error 404 - Page not found" message, which doesn't really help anyone.
My conclusion is that hyperlinks are both a blessing and a curse of the Internet. And so it's no science how to deal with hyperlinks, but every link-setter should be aware of his own responsibility when he sets a hyperlink to another website - not because of the content linked there, but alone because of the "Dead end" that he can produce with it.
The question is, am I writing for my readers or for the search engine? In my opinion, keeping links up-to-date is pointless, because how many readers do the old posts still have? It is much more important that the current article offers the maximum benefit and reading comfort for the reader at this moment of publication. That's why I don't skimp on links - knowing full well that some of them will break in 6 or 12 months. But hey, the lion's share of the readings of an info article usually occur in the first 4 weeks after publication. I have to offer the reader the WOW experience so that he comes back.
Therefore: Don't be afraid of broken links. I run the link checker on my blogs once a year and automatically remove broken links, that's enough.
Most bloggers probably write for themselves first — at least that's how I feel. Then he is certainly looking forward to as many other readers as possible.
The dead links bother me personally, perhaps because I also like to read posts that are a little more stale and these posts, especially when the author once guaranteed the readers a wonderful WOW experience, have now become a bit of a nuisance for later readers.
On my blog, it is definitely a negative WOW experience for me when I want to go back to the source linked there in an old blog post and then only get led into digital nirvana. Then I get annoyed every time that I didn't get the source bogged down in my Zettelkasten.
In any case, I completely agree with you that most readers no longer like to read older posts and therefore do not or hardly notice the dead links.
And that's why my "Linkgeiz" is more of a very personal matter.