Validate and check links often!

[Mohamed_E]

I periodically validate my site and check the outgoing links, but sometimes I get lazy and go for a long time without doing either. When I finally catch up there are usually only minor errors that are quickly fixed.

Today I revalidated the site, and as usual the errors were few and trivial (lots of unescaped apmersands in pasted URLs, several &nbsp's with no trailing semicolon). No big deal, browsers know how to deal with these errors.

But checking the links showed a big mistake. I have an include file which has links to the main sections of my site, assumed to be in the same directory as the file that calls the include. Recently I added a subdirectory (the first one) and all the files in it used the normal include. Needless to say Xenu was unable to find any of those links!

Of course this should have been detected much sooner. Major changes (including additions) should always trigger a rechecking (validation plus links). Just thought I would share the experience, it is less painful to learn from the mistakes of others than from one's own :)

[grandpa]

Good point Mohamed_E.

I just moved some pages to a new sub-domain, and was testing a new layout for the index. So my test index had the meta tag noindex, nofollow while I was testing. Guess what I forgot to do when that page went to production.

[grahamstewart]

lots of unescaped apmersands in pasted URLs, several &nbsp's with no trailing semicolon). No big deal, browsers know how to deal with these errors.

That is no reason to let these errors through.

The browsers you tested might have been able to 'deal with these errors' - but what about all the other browsers out there? And possibly more importantly what about search engine spiders?

[Mohamed_E]

That is no reason to let these errors through.

Obviously, when I found them, I corrected them.

For those who view validation as a practical tool, rather than as a theological imperative, there is a hierarchy of errors. I maintain that a broken link is a more serious error than an unescaped ampersand :)

[grahamstewart]

But the lack of a terminating semi-colon could be a much worse error than a broken link - because it could result in a spider aborting the indexing of your page and thus adversely affect your PR.

[grandpa]

because it could result in a spider aborting the indexing of your page

That would be a mighty intuitive spider to look at that on a page, like you or I, and say, "Huh?"

[grahamstewart]

Intuitive.. no, just the opposite.

It would be a spider with a parsing algorithm that couldn't handle non-terminated escape sequences. If you have ever written a parser you'll know that dealing with errors is often the hardest bit - especially if you need to recover from them and carry on.

Basically the more errors you have, even simple ones, the more likely it is that a spider will just give up on your page.

[creative craig]

Thanks Mohamed_E for sharing your misfortune with us :)

I am at the moment going through a few major changes on site of mine and I try to validate as I go, but I let slip on a few pages last Monday, I got them on Saturday though. So it should be all good.

Craig