Dead links and/or orphaned web pages

Question
1

Hi.

Does sparkle have an internal link checker to prevent dead links? Let’s say i have a page that is valid until a certain date. A handful links lead to this page. After expiration i delete this page, but forget to remove one or two links to this page.

Does sparkle give me a warning? The SEO checker? Or will these “dead” links be automatically rerouted to the homepage to prevent an error message? Not the best solution, but better that an error 404.

And now for the reverse case. Does sparkle find orphaned pages to which no link leads?

The larger a project gets, the more difficult troubleshooting can become.

Mr. F.

1 Like
2

The former issue leads to a “no link” link, so clicking leads to the page itself.

There’s nothing for the latter, and in fact sometimes it is intentional and desirable for a page to be unlinked.

But it would probably be good to have both in the seo checker.

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On the subject of a Link Checker… is there any standalone one you know of and can recommend?
My wife has a very large educational directory website with a list of over 14,000 sites that she has been checking manually for years. As you can imagine, with such a large site, odds are high that many sites listed will change or go defunct.

www.TeachTheChildrenWell.com

Bless her dedication… she does it all in raw HTML.
If Sparkle ever offered a link checker, perhaps she could be persuaded to use it instead.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Dave Doolittle

4

Sparkle’s SEO checker does link checking, though for that many links it might take quite a while to run…

I think you probably need a dedicated tool for that, but I don’t really know that sort of tool enough to suggest one.

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5

Thanks, Duncan!
Do you know if some part of Google (that isn’t widely known) might have this ability to check a long list of links?

6

Maybe their search console will do that, I’m not sure though, sorry.

7

In my project, I have experienced that Sparkle’s SEO checker claims some links “seem to be broken” although the URL is correct and the link on the published webpage works perfectly.

8

Hi KimOliver.

Is it perhaps this?

Mr. F.

And YES, it is allowed to use the search in this forum…

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9

Yes this is something we’ve been over already in other threads. The only way to check if a link is alive is to connect to the server, and some servers have aggressive anti-bot functionality that prevents link checking from working.

10

Hi Duncan.

I just found out that a “unlinked” PDF remains in the folder “downloads”.
That should be fixed as well, please.

Addendum: i had selected “store in this document”

Addendum #2: Small correction: There was probably still an invisible link to the PDF, so it was uploaded again after I deleted it. I have now manually searched everything, corrected and - tadaaa - result as requested. Sorry for the confusion.

Mr. F.

11

I’ve found that pretty well all of the speed test options have a dialogue regarding bad links. I know that https://www.webpagetest.org/ does. You can try for free.

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I use the free broken link checker here:

I ran https://teachthechildrenwell.com/
and it showed
100% scanned - 644/644 URLs checked, 609 OK, 35 failed
It only took 2 and a half minutes to let me know there are 35 links to investigate.

It lists each broken link in a table and says if it is a 403, 404, etc error or a timeout (took to long to connect I guess).

Maxim

3 Likes
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Super! Thank you so much! You have no idea how many hours my wife has slaved away checking all of her links manually on TeachThe ChildrenWell.com ! I will tell her about this! Thanks again!
Dave