Link Verification

An easy way to visually verify destination pages ?

[Jube]

I have a significant amount of links on my page which I would like to visually verify the destination page for. Is there an automated way of opening them all at once. At the moment it is a painful process clicking on each one !

Regards

Jube

[Macguru]

Opera allows you to open all bookmarks within a folder in one click.

[JamesR]

I use Xenu's Link Sleuth [home.snafu.de] and it will automatically run through a site and let you know which links are broken. I don't know of a tool that will automatically open all links though.

(and what Macguru said...:))

[bill]

<duck>
FrontPage has had this feature for as long as I can remember...

[brotherhood of LAN]

Was just about to say what Bill said ;)

I'm sure there are a few free HTML/text editors that do it also.

[Marcia]

At the risk of going a little off-topic, I've been checking links on some client sites, and not only are some links "dead" but with some of the sites linked to the original site owners discontinued their internet business and domains. On a couple, the domains were taken up by *ahem...off-topic* web publishers because of links and Page Rank. Some of the domains linked to were live, but are either inappropriate or currently penalized because they're link farms.

Even if there are good tools to automate the process, a visual hand check can't hurt every so often to make sure the links are going to where it's beneficial and won't do any harm.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Definetely worth pointing out Marcia!

One SE script I run has an option when spidering to disregard sites that have more than 1/2/3 redirects etc, which is one of those little good things that you can have to increase the quality of mass volume listings.

Though it seems that inevitably any serious directory has to have some way of comprehensively scanning its links for things like re-directs/404's

Getting a link verifier at least gets rid of the fluff.

[ergophobe]

By the way, the W3C has a link checker on their site along with their validators. I don't know whether there's a limit or not.

Tom

[Jube]

Thanks all.

Bill / BHoL - how do I use Frontpage to open all of the links I have in one go ?

I have been using the link verifier within Frontpage but unfortunately this seems to still register links as verified if the site to which I am linking delivers some kind of "whoops no url" type message instead of the 404 (?) error - hence the desire for me to physically see and verify each of the pages that I link to.

I have one page with around 300 links on it and cannot face the prospect of clicking on every single one each week !

Jube

[rogerd]

Jube, I think a weekly visual check of 300 links is overkill. I'd run Xenu, FrontPage, or similar weekly if you are really concerned (to catch 404s), and do the hand check at a more lengthy interval. (Or, if you are into weekly maintenance, then after you run your automated check do a visual check on a couple of dozen every week.)

Unless you are linking to a lot of changing content, e.g., newspaper articles, contests, etc., I really don't think you'll see much degradation in your links.

One thing to watch out for - there are some sites that do a server-side ban on Xenu (and probably other common private bots, or even FrontPage), so be sure to check any "dead" links in your browser before you delete them - the site may come up just fine in IE.

[bill]

Jube FP will make a nice report of all the URLs you've linked to that you can open one by one, but it won't open them all in one go. I don't think you'd want 300+ browser windows open at once ;). Like rogerd said, be careful with 404s FP or other software reports; inevitably some of them will be bogus.

[Purple Martin]

For those wanting to check links using Dreamweaver:

Select the file(s) or part of the site you want to check links for, then choose "Check Links" from the File menu.

As well as checking for broken links, it also allows you to check for orphaned files (files that don't have any links pointing to them).

[buckworks]

Wouldn't a visual check that each link went where it said be something you could farm out to some eager SEO apprentice or something?