I receive email from time to time informing me of broken links on my blog. The good thing—they let me know of broken links. The indifferent thing—given enough time, most links break (despite Tim's advice [1]) so that's expected. The bad thing—the people who send such email don't bother to actually read the page in question [2] and are really here to leech from my Google Page Rank [3] (for the record—3).
So it was very refreshing to see the following email:
From: "Amanda Tracy" <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: sean@conman.org
Subject: Broken Link on boston.conman.org/2002/06/02.1 [4]
Date: Wed, 19 Feb 2014 14:58:09 -0700
> Good Afternoon Sean!
I wanted to let you know that I really love your post about helping your friend “F” move out of his parent's house and into a town home! My favorite part was when you mentioned what it was like when F's dad was trying to clean off the furniture. That was hilarious!
When reading, I noticed that one of the links is incorrect. The link labeled “U-Haul” is currently taking readers to “u-haul.com”, but the correct domain is “uhaul.com”. I was wondering if it isn't too much to ask, that we fix the link to “uhaul.com”?
Thank you for taking the time to read through this email, I look forward to reading more of your blog posts!
Amanda Tracy > U-Haul International | Online Marketing and Strategy > Web Analyst > XXXXXXXXXXXX X XXXXXX > XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Not only was Amanda polite and to the point, she actually read the post in question!
Incredible!
With an email like that, of course it wasn't too much to ask to fix the link. And thank you, Amanda, for bringing the broken link to my attention.
[1] http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html