I have just spent the day fixing bad links on my website. Every website has them and over time they build up and become more of an irritation for visitors. Some of them are caused by typing slips when the web page is created, but others are because the web is a constantly changing place. You mention a great program you have discovered or a fantastic service and link to it, then a year later the program or service has been discontinued, the page has moved or even the whole site has gone. You then have a bad link.
It would be an impossible task to manually check every link on every page of a large website and an automated program is the only way to do it. I used Integrity on my Mac, but there are Windows and even Linux link checkers. (I must do a roundup one day and test them all.)
Integrity is a simple, but very useful app. You give it the URL of your home page and it goes and gets it. It checks every link in the page, then gets those pages and checks the links, then checks those pages and so on. It basically crawls your whole site, making a list of the links. There's a button in the toolbar to display just the bad links and then you can work through them and fix each one, updating your website afterwards. It's a great tool and it is free (donations welcome though). Try it if you have your own website.
Tuesday, 22 May 2012
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