A couple months back we wrote an article "Does Your Site Have Broken Links" where we urged you to check your site for broken links. We still urge you to do that so you can fix broken links ASAP.

Though we are always advising smaller businesses to always strive to do better and eliminate unforced errors like broken links, we also love making you feel a little better about your company's website by reminding you that some of the top companies in the U.S. and the world can sometimes do a horrible job of the same things. This is one of those times, as we look at broken links.


The Experiment

We wanted to get off the Fortune 500 list, so we're taking the top 10 U.S. retailers as compiled by the National Retail Federation. We searched Google to see how many pages they had indexed for that company's website.

Then we entered the company domain into the tool over at Broken Link Checker to see how many broken links they could track within the company's URL.

The raw numbers kind of speak for themselves. But we made a simple "Clean Links Score" by dividing the number of indexed pages by the amount of broken links.


Top 10 Retailer Results

1 Walmart
Total Pages: 41,800,000 - Broken Links: 12263 - Clean Links Score: 3408
Over 12,000 links might look like a lot, but their batting average is pretty good for a site with so many products and links.

2 Amazon
Total Pages: 230,000,000 - Broken Links: 1532 - Clean Links Score: 150130
Look at their Clean Links Score as compared to the others. Simply amazing. Despite what any of us think about Amazon, but hats off to them.

3 Kroger
Total Pages: 1,660,000 - Broken Links: 86,059 - Clean Links Score: 19
Pretty darn bad. Then again, how much are Kroger customers counting on their website.

4 Home Depot
Total Pages: 12,800,000 - Broken Links: 246 - Clean Links Score: 52032
Another really phenomenal IT achievement. So many links and pages on their site and only 246 broken links. Wow.

5 Costco
Total Pages: 232,000 - Broken Links: 119,849 - Clean Links Score: 1.9
OK, this is a low point in links maintenance on a website.

6 Walgreens
Total Pages: 572,000 - Broken Links: 1,268 - Clean Links Score: 451
Pretty good, middle of the pack performance.

7 Target
Total Pages: 4,480,000 - Broken Links: 665 - Clean Links Score: 6736
Another solid score. Good competition for Walmart.

8 CVS
Total Pages: 299,000 - Broken Links: 70,489 - Clean Links Score: 4
Not very good. Expect a bad link on one out of every 4 pages.

9 Lowe's
Total Pages: 5,020,000 - Broken Links: 60 - Clean Links Score: 83666
The most impressive number on this whole survey: only 60 broken links on their whole massive website.

10 Albertson's
Total Pages: 286,000 - Broken Links: 12,171 - Clean Links Score: 23
Seems like grocery store websites aren't faring well. Again, how many people go to their grocery store website.


The Takeaway

Just another friendly reminder that we all have work to do on our sites. We've got a client with 64,000 pages and 91 broken links to tackle.

But it's very comforting to give yourselves a break when you see that the largest companies in the world also struggle with the same things.