Broken Link Checking & Practices

What are broken link reports?

We currently use a link crawling service, Broken Link Check, that provides a weekly summary of broken or problematic links across all CNS, Department and various sites within our oversight. In coordination with the Communications and Web Team services we will periodically provide your department with a list of identified problematic or broken links for you to review and either remove or correct as needed.

Why do links break?

The simple answer is that the internal (CNS) and external websites and pages you link to inevitably change or move over time. The internet is fluid, and so links you place in pages today could break a week, a month, or a year later. Broken links don't lead to valid resources anymore, and visitors are going to get 404 error codes (infamous Page Not Found messages) or other unsuccessful responses each time when they try to access the web-pages.

The best remedy to this is to monitor your pages, using the broken link report provided, and repair links as you become aware of them. With regular maintenance broken links on your site or pages can be eliminated completely!

What is my responsibility as a content editors/owners?

All content editors are responsible to review their content and insure information posted is accurate and linking correctly. You will be provided with a link to your report, something like this: http://brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links-tx.php?site=neuroscience.utexas.edu

Know your content and where you want to direct your website users. Posting relevant and important information on your website leads to success in directing users to needed information. Changing content by other sites and even menu changes within our own sites will cause link breaking.

The broken links report is intended to assist you by providing the URL and source location of a found broken/problematic link. The report includes a line of items for each 'broken link' to include 'link text' and URL/SRC information on the page where the link is found.

I have the report, what do these sections mean?

Broken Link - URL for link that is either broken, timeout or bad host
Link Text - text within the page that is hyperlinked
Page Where Found - URL of the page on which the link was found and SRC information within the html code. To help further identify where the linking problem resides.

Glossary of Broken Link Checker Response codes

The system detects & reports the following link problems / HTTP response codes:

404	Page Not Found : the page / resource doesn't exist on the server
400	Bad Request : host server cannot understand the URL on your page
bad host	Invalid host name : server with that name doesn't exist or is unreachable
bad url	Malformed URL (e.g. a missing bracket, extra slashes, wrong protocol etc)
bad code	Invalid HTTP response code : server response violates HTTP spec
empty	Host server returns "empty" responses with no content and no response code
timeout	Timeout : HTTP requests constantly timed out during the link check
reset	Host server drops connections. It is either misconfigured or is too busy.

I've reviewed the list and some of the links are not broken!

In some cases a link will appear to be broken by the 'link checker' thus triggering the report but, upon review the link now appears in good standing. This can occur if a server was down or slow to respond during the time of the crawl. Also, if a page requires a login (i.e. UTDirect) it will be considered broken or not responding. Thank you for checking and confirming all is linking as intended. We encourage content owners to actively review information presented to the public to insure the best presentation and experience for individuals seeking information and direction.

Other resources or helpful tools -

Check My Links - provided by Google Chrome is a helpful add-on. This tool will help you identify where any broken links are within a given page.
- Using Chrome web browser navigate to the 'Check My Links' extension add on and follow the instruction to add to your Chrome web browser.
- Once downloaded and terms accepted you will see the iconat the end of the URL 'address' bar.
- Navigate to the page you want to view/check online and then click the icon to run the link check across that one page.