LINKS MANAGEMENT

Another major part of a comprehensive website maintenance and management system is to vigilantly identify and fix broken links. A broken link occurs when a page or location (whether on your website or some far flung web page) pointed to by another page has been moved, deleted, or renamed. Unfortunately, there are no automatic repair mechanisms standing by to sort the problem out. Most often the source page is simply left with a broken, or dangling link that leads to nowhere.

Any way you look at it, web-based businesses are heavily penalized for both broken outbound links (which are arguably under their direct control), and broken inbound links (to which a number of unsatisfactory solutions apply). Some obvious consequences of a failure to deal with broken links on your site and broken links that once pointed to your site are:

• Loss of revenue as potential customers attempt, and fail, to follow a broken link to your site.
• Brand damage since a broken link on a website is as bad, if not worse, than a misspelled word in a brochure. It takes diligent oversight to guarantee that a web page that revealed no flaws when placed on the Web, remains flaw free (including no broken links) as time goes on. A business with a website with broken links and broken links pointing to that business’s website might lead a consumer to the conclusion that the error is caused in some way by poor standards or bad administration within your business.
• Loss of productivity for the people who maintain your site. Broken links are a time-consuming headache and large sites may find it costly to keep up-to-date with broken link repairs.

The author notes that today the average website has one page in every four containing a broken link. It has been written that more than 10% of the total links on the Internet are broken. Just think, maybe one page in every four that points to your website could be sending your customers on a one-way trip down the drain!

Do you have links to other sites? If so, you must check these links regularly and update or delete them when the links are inaccurate. Be diligent about keeping your links updated so you can identify broken links quickly and pinpoint the pages you need to fix to keep your site at peak performance all the time. You don’t want your customers to see a “File not found” message when they are looking to buy. There are many applications and services available to help you with this, including:

ChangeAgent (www.xlanguage.com/products/cagent.htm). This link management tool discovers broken links, investigates their cause, and repairs them in a single, integrated environment. It also can remove orphan files and reorganize a site while maintaining link integrity. ChangeAgent works well with other applications allowing it to replace broken URLs while avoiding reformatting or restructuring your HTML code. Cost — $200.

CyberSpyder Link Test (http://www.cyberspyder.com/cslnkts1.html). This website management program not only verifies whether a website’s links are broken, but also provides content analysis services. CyberSpyder is designed to work with websites of all sizes — from the very small e-commerce site, to the large corporate site with thousands of links. Costs — CyberSpyder is distributed as shareware, as such it may be used free for up to 60 days for evaluation purposes, after that there is a small registration fee of $35.

Link Checker Pro (www.linkcheckerpro.com). A nice, inexpensive, no frills tool to check internal and external links. Link Checker Pro is easy to use and has many customizable settings. It allows reports of link data to be saved in HTML format that may be easily viewed in any Internet browser. Costs — Free for up to 30 days, thereafter there is a $40 registration fee.

Link Sleuth (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). This free spidering software checks websites for broken links. Link Sleuth’s link verification is carried out not only on “normal” links, but also on images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs, which you can sort by different criteria. Costs — Free.

LinkScan (www.elsop.com/linkscan/). The LinkScan family of products provides a host of industrial-strength link checking and website management tools. For instance LinkScan offers flexible test automation capabilities for the entire spectrum of web-based applications. Costs — $750 to $7500.

Linkscan also offers a free service, called LinkScan/QuickCheck (www.elsop.com/linkscan/quickcheck.html), which provides online link checking and HTML validation service. This free service permits you to check up to 10 web pages per hour and up to 50 per day (although there is a limit of 200 links per document). QuickCheck is intended as a quick way to check the quality and identify problems on a web page.

If you are diligent, and use one of the above-mentioned (or similar) software packages with intelligence, your customers, when trying to access your site through a link or browsing your site, should seldom see some of the common error codes listed below:

• Error 401 - Access to this page is denied.

  Error 402 - A payment is required.

  Error 403 - The request you have asked for is forbidden.

  Error 404 - File not found.

  Error 408 - Server timed out waiting for request.

  Error 500 - Internal server error.

  Error 502 - Error response received from gateway.