DQM Checkpoints and Standards

[#1]

Broken external links are very important as it can put users off from visiting your site as well as making them leave whilst being on your site. By spending less time on your site, search engine algorithms will assume it’s because your site isn’t providing visitors with quality content or information, resulting in a lower ranking.

• Broken links, like bad links, can cause you to lose clients and customers
• Broken links cause frustration and irritation — if clients and customers are trying to access information they bookmarked, a digital product they purchased, or an article that someone linked to on Twitter, and the links don’t work, their trust in you and your brand will diminish
• Broken links will hurt your conversion rates — after all, if a purchase link doesn’t work, the purchase won’t be made
• If links to a sales page for a new product, program, or service you’re using in your marketing don’t work, not many people will be able to sign up

Affects:	Usability & SEO
Technical Details	This checkpoint looks at link <a> tags, checks if the domain is external and performs a check to see if the links lead to a broken page. If so then this will be reported as an error. Broken links are identified based on the link's HTTP response codes.
Other Details:	How does Crownpeak define whether links are internal or external? When we set up your DQM instance we configure it to recognise internal/external links in the following way: 1. Internal Links Domain names are specified as internal based on the URLs provided for sites to be scanned. For example: If we wanted to scan the Crownpeak website using the URL https://www.crownpeak.com/ - we would configure the system to recognise any links in the site that have “.crownpeak.” in the URL as an internal link. (Note: More than one domain can be defined as internal.) 2. External Links Any links to domains which have not been specified as internal will automatically be regarded as an external link. Therefore - continuing from the above example - a link to Facebook (e.g. https://www.facebook.com/) would be regarded as external.