Make more money by making sure your links are valid html

[Simon]

I know that many webmasters don't bother validating their code. Not a good idea, for a variety of reasons. One of them is that unless you're validating your html code, you may never see any warnings to let you know that the sponsor links in your html pages may not be valid. And if they're not valid, it's possible that a surfer's browser won't read those links correctly, which could result in you not receiving credit for some of your sales.

The text below is from this page. It may help explain what I mean about sponsor links...

Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

A common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand ("&"). Take a look at this example:

<!-- This is invalid! --> <a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>

This example generates an error for "unknown entity section" because the "&" is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert &copy=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since ⟨ is the HTML entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert &lang=en to ?=en. And one old browser even finds the entity §, converting &section=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use & in place of & when writing URLs in HTML:

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2&amp;copy=3&amp;lang=en">...</a>

Note that replacing & with &amp; is only done when writing the URL in HTML, where "&" is a special character (along with "<" and ">"). When writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the location bar of your browser, you would use "&" and not "&amp;". With HTML, the browser translates "&amp;" to "&" so the Web server would only see "&" and not "&amp;" in the query string of the request.

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