If you want to know how well a company is really managing its IR website, don't look at the site itself, look at the websites that link to it. This is something we do as a routine part of our IR website audits -- and in almost every case we find significant deficiencies.

Regularly checking external links to your site is critical for two simple reasons:

1.) If your site doesn't have a presence on important external sites then it probably isn't getting all the traffic it deserves; and,

2.) Many things can and do go wrong with external links to a site - sometimes with devastating consequences.

So when we check external links to your website, we're checking to see that your site is properly represented on all the important places that it should be. And we're also checking to see that links to your site are in fact valid and properly formatted.

This is something you should be doing yourself. And you should be doing it every time you send out a news release or whenever you add, remove or change something on your site because this is when things frequently go awry.

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