Site closures

Can cause major problems for editors

[Mike_Mackin]

In addition to adding sites and cleaning up titles and descriptions, looking after link rot is an editors responsibility.

2001 has brought a rash of site closures which take up the editors time. So if you wonder why your site takes more time to be listed [it sits in unreviewed] consider that when theglobe folds at 9:00AM EST today it will leave almost 600 listings in ODP and who knows how many in other directories.

[Macguru]

>>looking after link rot is an editors responsibility

I use an utility to maintain outbound links sitewide every month. Are editors doing that by hand?

[mark_roach]

I think ODP has an automated link checker called Robozilla.

To handle this for my site I have written a mickey mouse link checker that checks all the links in my database.

Does anyone know of a good (& free) link checker that will spider your site and check all your external links ?

[Macguru]

I am satisfied with Xenu.

[rcjordan]

link checker: [webmasterworld.com]

<added>
Macguru beat me.

[Mike_Mackin]

Many editors do not simply delete these.
They are having great success finding where sites have moved to. At least that was the case concerning homepage.com sites back in April and May.

[Macguru]

!1000! posts! bravo Mike_Mackin!

So ODP editors also have to try to track down broken links? It is a lot of job for me, but I succeed roughly 60% of the time.

Speaking of ODP there is a good selection of link checkers for many platforms here.
[directory.google.com...]

[Mike_Mackin]

>I think ODP has an automated link checker called Robozilla.

Yes, but it only flags the URL.
A human then must check the site.
It could have been a server error, etc.
The site owner may have changed from /default.asp to /index.html

[mark_roach]

Thanks for the link to Xenu. Looks like it will be useful. I have seen Xenu in my logs so I guess I should have twigged.

>>Many editors do not simply delete these.

Good point Mike. Just to change tack slightly, one of the main reasons I like google so much is the cache which prevents exactly this type of problem.

[Macguru]

Mike can you give us an idea of how much time the average ODP editor gives us every month?

[Mike_Mackin]

No, but it can be from 2 minutes to hours and hours.
Consider that many top editors have 30,000 to 40,000 edits. Some have 60,000 to 80,000 edits. And as of "right now" there is one editor with 154,559 edits at ODP.