Our pages are full of links or at least that is the expectation of most people using the Internet and that is a necessary component for good Search Engine Optimization compliance. However it is not always easy to ensure that the links you provided when creating the Information Object remain valid. It is almost a certainty that some of the links you create will point to inactive pages or even invalid web domains altogether.

While that is an anoyance we all live with, it also has some serious consequences to page ranking within many search engines. "Page not found" (and most other HTTP 4xx error codes) are considered a bad thing.

GATE Village provides some Village Roles automatic web link checking, providing a report for you to go through as well as providing visual feedback on the page itself.

Finally, because this is a shared community site, each member's contributions to the Village can affect the other members and so after three weeks of not fixing a 404 error, the web page in error will either be automatically fixed or set to unpublished (and thus not available to search engines but still available to the author).