Link Testing On Various Webpages

Web page liks often get outdate, updated, pages get taken down or renamed. This causes many broken links. This page explains our research into remedying these broken links.

Why This Need Came About

Ultimately, I want to find mis-linked references to our newly renamed Graduate Catalog web pages from various independant departmental websites.

Ex: http://www.umbc.edu/chem-biochem/gradprog/GradCat.html has links to our old format of catalog pages. All of these references need to be found out and departments need to be notified

Important References

Xenu

Saw a link to Jenu on the page above and it referenced that Jenu was a java version of Xenu. I tried out Xenu which is the original PC version. It is multithreaded and very very fast.

Xenu is superb for tracking mislabeled, old, and erroneous links of any kind off of live and local webpages. It gives an extensive report of what is incorrect. It also crawls your website (hops to subsequent children pages automatically) and checks their links.

Here is a link to the Jenu page http://jenu.sourceforge.net/index.php

Download Xenu from http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Run a search on the UMBC Website, or for whatever areas of the website you need to search. This can be done also by creating a text file with the URLs. For each section you want to search, put that URL on another line of the text file. In Xenu, go to File > Check URL List (Test) and open up your text file. Xenu will search only the pages referenced in the text file.

When the search is done, accept viewing the results in HTML form.

When the HTML page loads, Select the “Site Map of HTML pages with a Title” option. This page will organize the information by incorrect hyperlink. For every bad hyperlink, there is a list of pages within the site(s) you searched that contain that bad hyperlink. In the case of the graduate catalog, all we have to do now is find the entry with the Old Catalog URL, and underneath it will be a list of pages that have that old link. We go through these one by one and contact their webmasters.

Link Verify

http://link-verify.sourceforge.net/index.en.html

Searches through subfolders well and bulks incorrect URLs together.

Link Checker

 
projects/linktesting/research.txt · Last modified: 02.15.2006 14:56 by 130.85.165.133
 
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