Sites dedicated to employment did best with less than two percent of broken links. Education and Sports sites showed a real need for improvement with around six percent link failure. A higher proportion of these external links fail on larger sites because the detection of breakages is a much bigger task.
Webmasters usually have more important things to do, but it still needs to be done.
The LinkAlarm service regularly checks all the links on a web site and emails a summary about the failures to the web administrator. Broken links are ones that do not work due to construction errors or because the target pages have moved or disappeared. The web administrator or site author fixes the problems described and relaxes until the next regular report arrives. Our members are saying the regular checking and reporting is the most compelling feature of the service. Higher level managers are looking for performance indicators on how their sites compare with others in their market.