Empty Links

How to find Dreamweaver Debris

[piskie]

I hope this is the right forum for this topic.

I have been contracted by a Design House to find and remove "Empty Links" that have been left behind by Dreamweaver. When Link Text is removed in DW Design view, <a href="widget.htm"> </a> type of damaging debris is left behind. Serves me right for pointing them out in the first place.

As we know, Google and Co will treat these as "Hidden Links" causing handicap or penalty.

As the number of sites involved is well into 3 figures and each having 50 to 500 pages, the task of finding and removing is daunting to say the least.

What I need to turn this from a nightmare into a manageable task is some sort of Site wide Link analysers similar to Xenu but that will report empty links as well as broken links.

Any suggestions PLEASE

[jatar_k]

sounds like a job for grep if it is on a unix box

my grep patterns aren't great but I am sure someone could give you a hint

it would give you a list of files and line numbers where they occur. Could also find and replace them but that is always a backup first scenario. ;)

[piskie]

These are on Windows Servers and although I can have full FTP access, they are VERY unlikely to give me Admin rights or whatever is required and with my very limited server knowledge, I don' blame them.

[jatar_k]

hehe, fair enough

massive find and replace seems the way to go then, not sure how good DW is at that

[piskie]

DW is devastating in find and replace mode. Really frightening. I have also found some links amongst them that contain punctuation etc innocently abandoned by DW and nothing Black Hat about them but Google wouldn't see it like that.

[rocknbil]

massive find and replace seems the way to go then, not sure how good DW is at that

If you have DW by way of the Studio MX Suite, you should also have Homesite on the CD. Homesite would do this as you can search and replace multiple files and it will search subdirectories. It even has the capacity in the S & R window to match on regular expressions.

[nancyb]

also, try NoteTab if you don't have HomeSite. It does S&R of all sub directories (if you choose) and you can use reg exp's.