Day 20: Go on a dead link hunt

Today’s challenge is another one that I read through on ProBlogger’s site and it immediately clicked with me. Every website that’s been around for a few years suffers from link rot to one degree or another. Sites that you linked to may disappear. Even worse, if you’ve moved your blog from one site/engine to another, many of your internal links may be invalid. Often blog posts will move over from one system to another just fine, but the links within those posts won’t be updated. Teach42 started off on Radio userland, then it moved to pMachine, and then I made the final move to Wordpress which is what I’ve stayed with. Without a doubt, I’m sure I’ve got some dead links in there that I’ve just been avoiding hunting for all this time.

There’s nothing worse when you’re reading a blog post, you find just the link you were looking for, try to click through and find that it’s dead. It can be incredibly irritating to readers, and discouraging enough to drive people away from your site. There’s a few well known bloggers that have moved a few times, and I know how bothered I’ve been when I try to navigate through their archives only to find that all their internal links have gone awry. It certainly doesn’t encourage me to make a return visit.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those tasks that just feels like it’s going to be an absolute nightmare to do so everybody puts it off. However, this challenge is all about taking a good close look at our blogs and doing all the unmentionable tasks that would normally be swept under the rug. So it’s time to grab a broom and dustpan and do some dirty work.

There are two sites and one PC based tool that I’ve had recommended to me. The tool is Xenu, and the two sites are Dead-Links.com and the W3C link validator. All of them do the same basic task, which is to crawl through your site and test each individual link. If it thinks the link is invalid, it flags it for you. Based on the specific way each tool/site does this, it may come up with different results than the others. That’s why you will probably want to do at least 2 of the 3 tests. I’d suggest running one test, checking the results and making changes as needed, and then running a second test.

More than likely, this is going to take a while. I’d suggest starting the test up and then going to watch CSI or taking a nap. By the time you’re done, the spider should have some results for you. I’m going to be running this for myself overnight tonight and then making any corrections I find over the weekend. I’ll report back on what the results are and you do the same.

Let us know what the spider found. Did you have a mess to clean up or was your site all spic n’ span? If you want to have some fun, try running your school’s website through it and see how it does! Then you can add a few items to your webmasters todo list! But let’s be honest, better to know than to not know, right?

5 Comments

Jim Beeghley
11/21/2008

I found this somewhat helpful for my blog. One of the things that I didn’t like was that it reported several 404 Not Found errors but in clicking on the links, they were valid so that didn’t make much sense.

One the flip side, it did find one that I had a typo in the URL.

Thanks,

Jim

Jim Beeghley´s most recent blog post.. President Lincoln in Gettysburg

Martha Thornburgh
11/21/2008

I ran both of the programs and came up with no errors or broken links. Hope that I did it right….;)

Martha Thornburgh´s most recent blog post.. You Can Create Avatars. Yes You Can!

Day Twenty - Thirty Days To A Better Blog « Virtual High School Meanderings
11/22/2008

[...] Day twenty in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger series was yesterday and asked us to look at Day 20: Go on a dead link hunt. Essentially, we were asked touse one of the online services that search through our blog for dead [...]

Natalie
11/23/2008

The spider didn’t find any dead links to content. It didn’t recognize Google Translate (which I tested and it seems to work) or some of the links to leave comments. I don’t know what that means, but they worked when I test them.

Natalie´s most recent blog post.. What DOES It Mean?

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[...] twenty-one in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger series was yesterday and asked us to look at Day 21: Give a comment a promotion. Essentially, the entry speaks about making sure we respond to comments and we were asked to [...]

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