Order of the Bath

A couple of weeks ago I ran a long overdue “broken link check” on West Penwith Resources. I do this using the excellent Xenu program which spiders the site and interprets all the HTTP error codes. I know it was over a year since I last did it, but was horrified to discover 25% of the external links broken. There were a few internal bugettes, typos etc. but in the process of fixing the others I came up with these types…

• Web site totally gone, no trace anywhere. I suppose funding may have dried up, companies gone to the wall and, not uncommon among genealogists, owner gone to be with their ancestors.
• Web site moved to another domain. This is understandable if moving up a gear from a freebie ISP host to a “proper job” custom domain name, though a redirect at least on the home page would be a good idea. I moved about 3 years ago, I think, and only recently have I not been able to find links to the old site. My redirect stayed up for most of that time. Big sites change domain when their department name changes or they are taken over. If they must do it, they ought to have the know how and resources to map page to equivalent page on the new site.

  Moving from one ISP site to another makes less sense and makes you wonder if the makers are serious about their site at all. Even if you don’t go the expense of a personal domain name, there are plenty of free hosts available, especially in the genealogy world.

• Individual pages moved and/or changed name. It is not just the amateurs who do this, some big corporate and government sites do it as well. Now listen up site owners—this is a BAD IDEA. Deep linking to internal pages is a matter of fact on the web so think out your structure well in advance and stick with it. We all make mistakes, I have a few pages in odd places, but you need to think very carefully before moving anything.
• A final curse—those sites that die and are taken over by resellers, link farms and other even less desirable content. Good though it is, Xenu can’t always spot these if they don’t use a redirect. The only way to find them is to actually visit your links occasionally. I am fortunate that my site is a working resource so I am using it every day.

This entry was posted on 7 Oct 2005 at 12:57 by Rick and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.