The Power of Creating / Maintaining Your Own Links

Could there really be a world wide web without hyperlinks? To me, the most durable, valuable, and potentially serendipity laced magic ones are made and managed by an individual.

All those “posts” tossed into LinkedIn, The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter, the One I don’t Use That has a face and a book in it, even my beloved Mastodon… those things indeed have a link to can point to, but they mostly just flow quickly down the stream, never to be readily found or used again. They are links, but rather ephemeral to me. And you cannot make sure they don’t vanish.

It’s the permalink, the permanent link, the ones you can keep from going down the storm drain, now those have power.

Take this trivial example. I get these emails often, some SEO wafting person tells me about a link on a 12 year old blog post is broken. How nice. How caring. But what they want is me to use one they are paid to get hustled and pushed onto sites. How can it be worth someone’s time to be sniffing out dead links on old web pages on some fringe blog?

Meet Tyler, the CEO/Founder of some company that pitches text prep resources, who writes:

Hi Alan Levine,

I came across a broken link to a “how to edit your hosts file on Windows, Mac, or Linux”  resource in your page “Highs and Lows of Technical Problem Solving â The CogDog Show” under the anchor text “edit the hosts file on your computer”. Our research indicated that you were the right person to contact about that page.

Broken links can reduce your Google search ranking and confuse readers. If you’d like to replace the link, here’s an article from Achievable’s blog that covers the same topic: https://blog.achievable.me/tech/edit-hosts-file-on-windows-mac-or-linux/

Thank you,
Tyler

unsolicited email means you give me the rights to post it, that’s my rule!

I am impressed that the CEO of a Big Company (?) has that much time to be looking for dead links on 9 year old post on a web blog/portfolio I did for a TRU fellowship in 2014-2015 (I am suspicious of their research that “indicated that you were the right person to contact about that page” – nowhere is my email address on that site, the “research” most likely is they bought my contact info and links from some personal data reseller).

Thanks for the heads up on the dead link, Tyler! But before I got just mindless swapping in the link you are shoving my way, I will do my own “research”. Indeed the original link to HowToGeek.com I had in my post:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/

is dead. 404. Kaput. But in about 10 seconds, I search the HowToGeek site, and find it lives now at

https://www.howtogeek.com/27350/beginner-geek-how-to-edit-your-hosts-file/

which I can fix on my original post. But seriously, there is another lesson here. Someone at HowToGeek.com changed the link structure of their own web site, they removed the /howto in the original URL. I know that this can be done with some edits of a web site’s .htaccess file or in their domain control panel. Heck, maybe HowToGeek could manage to write this one up.

The lesson here is that when you, be it an individual or some IT team supported outfit, changes your URL structure, for ****** sake, take the steps to create a redirect from the old URL you broke. And a big thanks to Thompson Rivers University for keeping the lights on my ancient site on TRUbox!

Being part of the web, to me, at least, means not only publishing content, but doing some diligence to keeping published URLs in tact. Or not leaving them hanging in the wind for some dude named Tyler to be out there pushing his replacements.

Yes, I am responsible for many broken links on all my site. But If I am going to change them for a reason, I do everything I can to not leave a previous made external link to my stuff go to the dead zone in room 404.

I respect Ben Werdmuller and read his blog regularly (hallo RSS) but have to say that in response here

I have zero expectation of producing “brilliance”. And while I agree with Ben that the value is the regular flow of writing, the true secret of blogging, and just making your own web sites by any means, is being able to create, and take care of, your links that you add to the web.

Putting the permanent into permalink.

I get all kinds of echos back from permalinks I’ve created recently like one that happened this week or another from web eons ago, a post that just keeps clicking in comments to an apparently used furniture community I accidentally created.

Putting a link into the giant massive vat of other links on the web is not about getting famous or lots of reads, its creating a small beacon of transmission, that might be found some future day by a person I don’t know. They might contact me or not, but that is what blogging and doing your web site does. It makes the web.

Even if it gets hoovered up into some AI generative borg machine, that humble, single link is part of something bigger.

Make your own links. And take care of them.

Well, I for one will keep at it.

Note: no wonder I did not get millions of views on this brilliance! I thought I published it but found it lingering in my drafts.

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Featured Image: It’s weird as I am able to easily find my own metaphor images of real world photos with having to type into a box to generate some cartoon synthetic generated ones. This is my own photo! Each Link Makes a Chain flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license