What Everybody Ought To Know About Link Management

Creating a link in a blog post or your site is easy enough. In WordPress blog post for example, all you have to do is highlight the text, click on the button that looks like a chain, type in the URL you want it to go to and then click on the Insert button. Great, you have just created a link.

Future-proofing Your Links

What if the URL to that link changes? Well, all you need to do is select the link again and change it, right? Nice. Now what if you have a lot of that same link in a lot of other blog posts? Go to each and every blog posts and change it. Not so nice now, is it?

Hence the talk about link management. How do we manage a plethora of links that we have already inserted into all the blog posts that has been published? The idea here is for you to so called future-proof all the links that you have created and you already have an asset to do that.

Using An Asset You Already Have

The asset that I am talking about here is your own domain with a web hosting account. What you can do is to create custom links using your domain to point to whatever URL you want. For example, if I want a link to a site, I can create a custom link using my domain that looks like www.mydomain.com/links/widgets/ but have it point to widgets.com.

By doing that, whenever that link changes, you make changes to your custom links and it will now point to the new URL. So how do we create this custom link using our domain? There are a few methods to do that and I am going to highlight three methods that should be fairly easy for anyone to do.

Using a .htaccess file
By using an existing (or you can create one) .htaccess file, you insert a string of text which tells the browser where to go to when your custom link is clicked or entered into the address bar. So open up your .htaccess file and add your custom link using the following format.
```
redirect 301 /links/widgets/ http://widgets.com/
```
Replace /links/widgets/ with any value with anything you want to appear after your domain and the http://widgets.com/ with the URL it should point to. This is called 301 redirect method. New links can added into this one .htaccess file by inserting it below the previous one.
Using an HTML file
An HTML file can also be used to redirect one link to another and this should be fairly easy to do. Create a blank HTML file and name it widgets.html and then add the following codes into it.
```
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0;URL=http://widgets.com/">
```
Change widgets.html to anything you want and http://widgets.com/ to the URL it should point to. This is called the meta refresh method. A new html file is to be created for every link.
Using a PHP file
This method is similar to the abovementioned with the exception of creating a PHP file and using PHP codes. Useful for those sites that has pages which ends with .php and to make the link more uniform. Create a blank file and name it widgets.php and insert the following codes.
```
<?php
header('Location:http://widgets.com/');
?>
```
Change widgets.php to anything you want and http://widgets.com/ to the URL it should point to. This is called the PHP redirect method and a new file needs to be created for every link.

All of these files are to be placed in the root folder of your site. So now, when someone click on http://www.yourdomain.com/links/widgets/ or http://www.yourdomain.com/widgets.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/widgets.php, they will be sent to http://widgets.com/.

Link Cloaking Or Link Management

Some will call this link cloaking because the one clicking on the link does not see (on their status bar) where the link will actually bring them to. I call it link management. It maybe a small matter to some but you will have to consider this. When a visitor clicks on the link that is on your blog post and they get an error, what do you think the cost will be for you?

If you were to try any of the methods that I have shown above, let me know how it works out for you. We could also discuss some of the pros and cons of each methods. Now, don’t you just wish you had a plugin that could do the same thing for you without all those hassle of creating a new file?