Note To Vendors: Many Of You Have a Lot Of Broken Website Links

Over the weekend I moved my blog to the WordPress platform and in the process, I also checked every single link in all of my posts. I found more than 600 broken links due to vendors changing the directory structure for the site and moving the location of their press releases. While many vendors have re-launched their website with a new look and feel, in the process, quite a few changed the default path to their press releases from something like /press to /media. As a result, all of the previous links to your news are now broken, not just on my blog, but on the hundreds of news sites around the web. For some of the larger vendors that get a lot of news coverage or put out a lot of releases, this adds up to thousands of broken links to your news. Some vendors have re-mapped their old directory structure to default to their home page, but most vendors haven’t even done that, so readers simply get a 404 error.

I spent nearly 15 hours manually fixing all these broken links on my blog by going to each vendors site and finding the new URL, but most blogs and websites aren’t going to take the time to do this, especially the larger ones, which will have the most broken links. So if you’ve recently re-launched your company’s website, please take a look at your directory structure and make sure that previous links to your press releases still work.