Author: Steve Weinberg
Date: 2/14/2005
The “Broken Link Doctor.” That’s what REL Software calls their latest incantation of Web Link Validator. Rightly so, and much more! This software program finds broken links in web pages (like www.rpcug.org) and lots of statistics too (old pages, slow pages, deep pages, etc.).
Let me backup and explain what this is all about. What is a “broken page.”
Ever click on a link on a website and get the dreaded 404 error (page not found)?
This means that the web page code is sending you to a place that does not exist.
Maybe it did once upon a time, but it’s gone now. It’s the webmaster’s
responsibility to check the website periodically to prevent these problems.
I was glad to have the opportunity to review this software as it makes my job
so much easier.
How could a link break after it’s been working just fine? Often there is a link to a page on some company’s website and the company reorganizes and updates the site or just removes that page? Companies do this all the time to give us the new and improved versions of their websites. For this reason (this always change), the website links should be validated (checked) periodically.
Web Link Validator is a very comprehensive tool that checks an entire website
including internal and external links as well as compiling lots of statistics
simply by entering the URL (like www.rpcug.org). There are loads of reports
(see screen shot) to analyze your website in many different ways.
A useful feature is the easy way to exclude links from being checked through which I excluded the checking of the links on our calendar pages. The page for each month on our online calendar has links to every other month of the year and the previous and next years. Checking this would go on indefinitely and the results would be senseless and useless.
I use JavaScript code in our RPCUG website to enable the left-side menu. This is one of the first validator tools I have used that can deal with the JavaScript code and validate the links that it points to. It worked flawlessly.
If you have a website that consists of many links or one that has links to other sites that change frequently, this is the tool for you. The speed is quite good as well. It is free to try and $95 to buy. Go to www.relsoftware.com to check it out.