Posted by Alan Cole on 03/01/06 11:27

In article <mjoa02lob3fdijrnuet0r0oc6m5ot5fq50@4ax.com>,
xyZed <xyzed@xyzed.co.uk> wrote:

> There is circumstantial evidence that on Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:19:36
> +0000, Alan Cole <justal@lineone.net> wrote
> _______________________________________________________
>
>
> >� None whatsoever
>
> I think I know what you mean, and fundamentally I probably agree, but
> to me, broken links in a site you rely on for your only source of
> income cost money and they need automated checking, especially
> affiliate links . Broken links on my personal site where I have my
> reviews, poems etc are not critical at all and merely inconvenient.
>
> I don't monitor where traffic is coming from on my personal site
> either because it's just my home site, which I hope some people will
> find and enjoy but if no one ever visited it I would be merely
> disappointed and not financially ruined.
>
> Monitoring what visitors do, where they came from, how long they stay
> etc on my home site would be purely out of interest on my home site
> but on a business site it's critical information to be acted on.
> Position on search engines etc, again is purely academic unless it's a
> business (unless you are taking your personal non profit site pretty
> seriously - which is fair enough)
>
> I don't mean to imply that some people don't take their sites
> extremely seriously unless they make money but I can't see how a
> business site needs no more tools than a hobbyist site.
>
> Can a link checker check javascript affiliate links btw? And can it
> also inform if the page linked to has changed? I keep finding that
> even affiliate links suddenly stop working because some idiot has
> moved the page I linked to.

If it is that important to you (and I can understand why such a thing
would be) then the only surefire way to make sure that your links are
actually pointing to what you intend them to point to is to check them
manually yourself... I'm sure there is an application that will monitor
outbound links for you and tell you if the page they link to has been
modified, but it will be up to you to manually check if the
modifications should result in you removing the link from your site or
not.

I may have been a little pedantic, but a link-checker isn't an
'Essential Tool' for maintaining a website (however critical the site)..
That doesn't of course mean that it might not be a very important tool
for you.

Al.

--
Alan Cole. E-mail: justal at lineone dot net
http://www.forces-of-nature.co.uk [Coastal Sports]
http://www.pixelwave.co.uk [Website Design, hosting and promotion]

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