There's been a lot of discussion between ourselves and a number of our clients regarding the affect broken links have on their scores and therefore their rankings in the Sector Surveys.

This debate has been mostly with our local government clients as they are mandated to have links with central government sites as well as to other council sites within their locality.  It is these external links that are the cause of the problem as they are seen as outside of our clients control and they don't have the total freedom to remove them from their sites yet in some cases are a frequent cause of problems that materially affect their rankings.  Local government organisations are amongst our keenest and most enthusiastic viewers of our surveys.

The problem is greater for the local government sector as the quality of the sites is much higher than in other sectors so there is a "bunching" of sites with good scores.  So a broken link that drops their score by even a small amount can mean a substantial drop down the survey.

People ask us to exclude these links from the surveys so that they don't skew the results.  This can't happen.  It's important that we keep the surveys completely impartial and consistent.  Lots of people could come up with reasons to exclude certain of our tests as they feel there are good reasons why they can't clear the problem etc etc.  The surveys have to remain consistent for every site in the list.

It's the bunching that exaggerates the problem.  However it's where we are, so we have to deal with it.

The key thing from our point of view is that there is no way for our software to understand the importance of links so we must treat all links equally.  It may be that the link is just to another councils events page or it may be a link to the site that handles the site's credit card payments.  We can't know.  So if we find a broken link we must score sites down.  We're sympathetic to the problem but I don't see a way of handling this in a sensible and equitable way.

It should be possible to explain to interested parties the reason that your sites dropped down the survey is due to the external links and not something you can easily affect.  We need to keep in mind that the quality of your site is the important thing and that the surveys are a simple way of trying to track and represent this.