My email this morning brought me a report of a broken link on our web site. Which I investigated, and found to be within a blog entry I had written a year ago, and linked to someone else's site over which I have no control.
I'm a great believer in providing a wide range of linked resources for our customers, and for other visitors to our web site. With links to sites that we manage (and there are lots of them, from
our company overview microsite to
Save the Train and from
our PHP course pages through to
image reuse details via
the hotel and
the First Great Western customer page), I know how likely (or otherwise) it is that the URLs will go away or change in the future (and can link accordingly), but with most external sites,
the best I can do is make an educated guess!
This is not an exact science ... so what can I suggest?
a) That links to the major pages of well established organisations are likely to remain substantially correct, as are links to pages that one's encouraged to link to
b) That links by IP address, to obscure URLs especially within blogs, forums and wikis, are likely to go out of date
It's regrettable that there's no way that you can register any links you add and get the people to whom you've linked to let you know when they take pages away ... but the good ones will replace pages they remove with "301" redirects rather than just abandoning you - as I found this morning - to a "404" not found.
There's another option. You can write a spider / script that will visit all the pages to which you have provided links from time to time, and update you on their status. I have one of these somewhere in a dusty directory - written in Perl and using the LWP module, it trawled my own pages for external references, then visited each of those internal references in turn. But I admit - it's years since I've looked back at it and I need a month of Sundays to catch up on such things.
My current view is that external links within my main pages are very carefully selected, and will rarely go out of date - and I would typically know very quickly. External links on blog articles and on forum answers - well - the
reasonable person may expect them to go out of date over time, especially if they're something like an advert for an
event in July!
(written 2008-05-04)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
W503 - Web and Intranet - Hypertext [1034] The new web site look spreads - (2007-01-15)
[4035] Special characters in HTML - (2013-03-09)
[4036] HTML tags uses in these blog articles - (2013-03-09)
G902 - Well House Consultants - Web site techniques, utility and visibility [23] Skills and responsibilities - (2004-08-22)
[32] Web design platoon - (2004-08-29)
[98] No more 'Error 404' pages. Something better. - (2004-10-24)
[109] URLs - a service and not a hurdle - (2004-11-04)
[117] A case of case - (2004-11-14)
[142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)
[165] Implementing an effective site search engine - (2005-01-01)
[173] Data Mining - (2005-01-09)
[179] The hunt for unique words - (2005-01-16)
[182] Your personal Google ranking - (2005-01-19)
[197] Allow for peak traffic on your web site - (2005-02-01)
[202] Searching for numbers - (2005-02-04)
[222] Who are all these visitors? - (2005-02-20)
[259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
[261] Putting a form online - (2005-03-29)
[268] Information request forms, cleaning up spam - (2005-04-05)
[274] Our most popular resources - (2005-04-10)
[276] An apology to Mr Boneparte - (2005-04-11)
[278] Cover all the options - (2005-04-13)
[284] The Iconish language - (2005-04-19)
[288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
[311] Growth pains - (2005-05-14)
[314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
[320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
[322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
[347] Frightening and from-friend viruses and spams - (2005-06-14)
[348] Graveyard pages - (2005-06-15)
[369] CMS - the minefield of Choices - (2005-07-05)
[376] What brings people to my web site? - (2005-07-13)
[414] Form Madness - (2005-08-14)
[492] New Navigation Aid - Launch of My Wellho - (2005-11-11)
[510] Dynamic Web presence - next generation web site - (2005-11-29)
[528] Getting favicon to work - avoiding common pitfalls - (2005-12-14)
[533] Bigger Box Campaign - (2005-12-18)
[649] Denial of Service ''attack'' - (2006-03-17)
[658] Keeping the visitors happy and browsing - (2006-03-26)
[681] Mirroring a dynamic site - (2006-04-12)
[718] Protecting images from theft - (2006-05-12)
[732] Where is a web site visitor browsing from - (2006-05-24)
[757] Horse and Python training - (2006-06-12)
[767] Finding the language preference of a web site visitor - (2006-06-18)
[800] Effective web campaign? - (2006-07-12)
[893] Visibility - (2006-10-14)
[916] Driving customers away - (2006-11-07)
[976] Santa at the station - (2006-12-09)
[994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
[1015] Search engine placement - long term strategy and success - (2006-12-30)
[1029] Our search engine placement is dropping. - (2007-01-11)
[1055] Above the fold - (2007-01-28)
[1104] Drawing dynamic graphs in PHP - (2007-03-09)
[1177] Sorting out for a site map - (2007-05-05)
[1184] Finding resources - some pointers - (2007-05-13)
[1186] Two new pages / sites - (2007-05-14)
[1198] From Web to Web 2 - (2007-05-21)
[1207] Simple but effective use of mod_rewrite (Apache httpd) - (2007-05-27)
[1212] What brought YOU to our web site? - (2007-06-01)
[1237] What proportion of our web traffic is robots? - (2007-06-19)
[1297] Stuffing content into a web page - easy maintainance - (2007-08-09)
[1437] Above the fold with First Great Western - (2007-11-19)
[1494] A time to update pictures - (2008-01-03)
[1505] Script to present commonly used images - PHP - (2008-01-13)
[1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
[1513] Perl, PHP or Python? No - Perl AND PHP AND Python! - (2008-01-20)
[1534] Where in the world / country is my visitor from? - (2008-02-07)
[1541] Colour, Composition or Content - (2008-02-16)
[1554] Online hotel reservations - Melksham, Wiltshire (near Bath) - (2008-02-24)
[1610] PHP course dot co, dot uk - (2008-04-13)
[1634] Kiss and Book - (2008-05-07)
[1653] How do Google Ads work? - (2008-05-25)
[1711] Rapid growth leads to server move - (2008-07-17)
[1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
[1756] Ever had One of THOSE mornings? - (2008-08-16)
[1793] Which country does a search engine think you are located in? - (2008-09-11)
[1797] I have been working hard but I do not expect you noticed - (2008-09-14)
[1833] Web Bloopers - good form design - avoiding pitfalls - (2008-10-11)
[1856] A few of my favourite things - (2008-10-26)
[1888] Find the link - (2008-11-16)
[1955] How to avoid duplicating web page maintainance - (2008-12-20)
[1961] Making our things easier to find - (2008-12-26)
[1970] Plagarism - who is copying my pages? - (2009-01-02)
[1982] Cooking bodies and URLs - (2009-01-08)
[2056] Web Site Loading - experiences and some solutions shared - (2009-02-26)
[2065] Static mirroring through HTTrack, wget and others - (2009-03-03)
[2225] How important is a front page ranking on a search engine? - (2009-06-09)
[2332] Formation, des langages Open Source - (2009-08-09)
[2333] Formaci[83][c2]ón, de los lenguajes de c[83][c2]ódigo abierto - (2009-08-09)
[2334] Formazione, Open Source computer lingue - (2009-08-09)
[2335] Ausbildung, die Open-Source-Sprachen - (2009-08-09)
[2336] Forma[83][c2]ç[83][c2]ão, Open Source computador l[83][c2]ínguas - (2009-08-09)
[2337] Opleiding, Open Source computertalen - (2009-08-09)
[2338] Uddannelse, Open Source computer sprog - (2009-08-09)
[2339] Oppl[83][c2]æring, Open Source datamaskinen spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
[2340] ldning, Open Source dator spr[83][c2]åk - (2009-08-09)
[2341] Koulutus, Open Source tietokone kielill[83][c2]ä - (2009-08-09)
[2389] Writing with our customers words - (2009-09-01)
[2410] Removal of technical resources from this site - (2009-09-19)
[2519] Status Page / breaks of service in early December - (2009-11-30)
[2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)
[2552] Web site traffic - real users, or just noise? - (2009-12-26)
[2569] How to run a successful online poll / petition / survey / consultation - (2010-01-10)
[2668] Is it worth it? - (2010-03-09)
[2981] How to set up short and meaningfull alternative URLs - (2010-10-02)
[3022] Retaining web site visitors - reducing the one page wonders - (2010-10-31)
[3087] Making the most of critical emails - reading behind the scene - (2010-12-16)
[3149] Looking back at www.wellho.net - (2011-01-28)
[3197] Finding and diverting image requests from rogue domains - (2011-03-08)
[3367] Google +1 - what is it? - (2011-07-22)
[3426] Automed web site testing scripted in Ruby using watir-webdriver - (2011-09-09)
[3491] Who is knocking at your web site door? Are you well set up to deal with allcomers? - (2011-10-21)
[3532] Sharing the user experience - designing a form with the customer in mind - (2011-11-29)
[3554] Learning more about our web site - and learning how to learn about yours - (2011-12-17)
[3563] How big is a web page these days? Does the size of your pages matter? - (2011-12-26)
[3589] Promoting a single one of your domains on the search engines - (2012-01-22)
[3623] Some TestWise examples - helping use Ruby code to check your web site operation - (2012-02-24)
[3734] QR codes with marketing logos embedded - (2012-05-16)
[3744] Short Web Addresses for Melksham - (2012-05-30)
[3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
[3776] Some traps it's so easy to fall into in designing your web site - (2012-06-23)
[3896] An email marathon - (2012-10-15)
[3974] TV show appearance - how does it effect your web site? - (2013-01-13)
[4001] Helping search engines with appropriate 400 error codes - (2013-02-11)
[4076] Web site - fully back! - (2013-04-29)
[4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
[4136] How do I post automatically from a PHP script to my Twitter account? - (2013-07-10)
[4239] Facebook marketing - early experiences - (2014-01-19)
[4376] Well House Consultants, Well House Manor, First Great Western Coffee shop, TransWilts / 2014 web site reports - (2015-01-01)
[4401] Selecting RECENT and POPULAR news and trends for your web site users - (2015-01-19)
[4474] Effect on external factors on traffic to our web sites - an update - (2015-04-26)
[4492] Almost so wrong, but perhaps it's right for some? - (2015-05-11)
Some other Articles
Changing a screen saver from a web page (PHP, Perl, OSX)Lua - a powerful, up and coming scripting languageLooking back through some photosTo provide external links, or not?A short introduction to our coursesGant charts - drawing them with a PHP scriptAmazing family membersEarly May - a short chance to regroup and improveBox from end to end