Authorized
Reseller of
LinkWalker™
Common
Questions
About Link Checking
Do I still need a webmaster?
Of course you do. We don't replace web designers or webmasters, just as spell checkers don't replace writers.
Web design and maintenance is a creative, exacting process. Designers need to focus on more important creative aspects and bring intelligence to the project. Let our LinkWalker™ robot take on the mindless grunt work of link checking for you.
Writers don't waste their days flipping through dictionaries, so why should webmasters be slaves to link checking?
I'm not a client, but I received a broken link notice. What does it mean?
LinkWalker™ visits millions of pages a day in maintaining our map of the Web. In these routine orbits, if we come across a broken link on your site we may notify you of the problem. There is of course no cost or obligation associated with these notices.
The courtesy notices report on the first broken link we find, and are done on the recommendation of the Robot Guidelines discussed above. Specifically, the Guidelines recommend that "Your robot might come across dangling links… If you are convinced they are in error (as opposed to restricted), notify the administrator of the server."
The email is sent to the contact email address provided on the site. You can email the main company to change the contact address, add sites to our map or to suppress future notices.
Why do links break?
When you create a link on your Web site, you provide the name of the page to load. If that page has been moved, renamed or deleted, the browser can't find the file and gives an error message. This affects links within your site, your links to other sites, and other people's links to your site from elsewhere on the Web. When you move or delete a page you may be breaking someone else's link. It will cost you traffic, and without our service you'll likely never know there's a problem, until you notice your site traffic is declining.
I rarely edit my site, so why does it need frequent checking?
Even if you never edit your site your links can break. If you have a link to another site, that webmaster could move or delete the page out from under your link. Without our service, you likely won't know your links are broken until your customers tell you.
Can't I just use link-checking software?
There are programs you can buy to check your links, but they fall short in a number of ways.
- Since links can
and do break frequently you have to take the trouble to run the
software daily. Usually people have better things to do and link
checkers tend to sit on the shelf.
- Link checking programs can't find the broken links INTO your site that cost you traffic. Our 1.1 billion-link map of over 5.2 million Web sites lets us check links into your site. We're unique in offering a proactive service to protect your inbound traffic by notifying you of broken links both from and to your site.
How does your service work?
Our service works by utilizing our own map of the Internet that we continually update and expand. We have mapped over 1.1 Billion links from 5.2 Million web sites. We store all of these links and URLs and use this data to track who links TO your site, and to exactly what page they point.
Then, since we have a map of everyone's sites and the pages they contain, our program verifies whether your site has a page underneath any links into it. If not, we email you to advise you of a bad inbound link. We also verify every page in your site, as well as every page you point to, just to make sure that your site is working as you designed it to.
Will you overload my site?
No. Our robot, LinkWalker™, is very well behaved and puts much less load on your site than a single human visitor with a browser. We don't fetch audio, video or animation files and fetch only .html files that have changed since our last visit. We wait 15 seconds between file requests and achieve our scanning volume by visiting over 1,000 sites in parallel to keep the load on each server to a minimum. We also watch IP addresses to ensure we don't scan multiple sites on the same server in parallel.
What are the Robot Guidelines?
The Robot Guidelines are a set of voluntary guidelines that define how polite robots should behave when they visit Web sites. One key recommendation is the robots.txt exclusion standard that allows you to control how all or specific robots access your site and specify files or directories that should be avoided. The guidelines also discuss load distribution, scan rates and the sharing of broken link information.
Will you ever sell my email address?
No. All names and addresses are held strictly confidential and are never sold.