So after doing The Personal Finance Place, I inserted a whole bunch of Amazon links in it to different books and such, but completely bollocks’ed up the links so that anyone who clicked on them got an HTTP 404 message asking them if they are smoking the crack.
Checking your links work correctly is like making sure you use the Spell Checker. Yes, you can put up psotings wtih lousy spelling, but it does make you look stupid. In the same way, you need to check your links and make sure they all work correctly too!
Oh, and if you think folks are “scraping” your material for their sites, include internal links to your blog. That way if they put it on their site, you’ll have a link back to your site!
There are plenty of WordPress plugins to check for broken links to external sites, like Broken Link Checker (a well-named plugin, don’t you think?). You add a level of sophistication to your site if you appear to give a crap about your content enough to check it every once in a while.