Broken, bad links

[Bilinda]

I've been checking the hundreds of links all my sites have, and it's really pissing me off. So many are broken, lead to virus warnings, now a parked page and so on. That's the problem when you start getting hundreds of links to dozens of sites.

It gets hard to keep track of them all. Makes me want to stop trading links and find some way to get links without swapping. Guess I'll be spending this week weeding out bad links.

[olexisomar]

It will be helpful if you post the user ID of the guys involved on that kind of practice, So everyone here is aware of it.
Thanks in advance.

[Bilinda]

It will be helpful if you post the user ID of the guys involved on that kind of practice, So everyone here is aware of it.
Thanks in advance.

Well not all of them are from Linkspun users. In fact most of them are not. But I know some are, just got to study my list and figure out who they are.

Any links I see that are going to a parked page, getting a virus warning or just broke I'm taking them down first and worrying about who they belonged to later.

The link checker should alert me and the other webmaster my link is down, in which case I can then contact the other and tell them I'm stopping the trade.

Lately I've been getting a ton of link request and turning them all down because they only have new sites with zero PR. Seems to be a big surge of crappy sites here now. I may rethink just how wise it is to swap links.

No matter how often you do it, you still simply add one and get one to your network. So overall your really not getting anything or boosting your sites. Maybe a few, but at the cost of the others you add the link to.

The only way to really get a real boost is to get one way back links without having to add any. Easy to do in mainstream but hard in adult.

[olexisomar]

just got to study my list and figure out who they are.

I'm doing it right now and taking action, then I will post the users involved on so the webmasters here are aware of it. So far I have no problem with it neither on my link ex settled by other apps, I guess I'm lucky .

[vrocks]

A free tool for doing some basic checking is called Xenu. Google it.

[Bilinda]

A free tool for doing some basic checking is called Xenu. Google it.

Thanks much, I will check it out.

[suki8888]

A free tool for doing some basic checking is called Xenu. Google it.

that was a helpful one. thanks

[fetishbank]

Xenu is a great software! I've checked many and it is the best. Curious to see that most of the times a free software works MUCH better than commercial (and expansive) programs. It scans the over 45,000 links of Fetish Bank in a hour or so and provide an easy-to-read report of broken links.

It also provides a report of redirecting url. That report has to be carefully analysed, as many of them are legitimate redirect. I personally have thousands of redirects, so checking what is changing every time is complicate and time consuming. I workarounded that writing a small piece of software that reads the Xenu report, compares the targets of the redirecting links with legitimate values storedin a text file and notify me about the changes. At that point i'm going to check what is changing and why...

As strategy, I'm doing a scan of my site at least once a week -> minimum effort & clean site

As Xenu opens all the urls, the antivirus rings when it opens a page with malicious code and I can remove it immediately. Obviously, in this case, I FIRST deactivate the link and LATER notify the owner.

Parked pages are sometimes a bit harder to discover as often they don't give back a 404 error or redirect (302) but send a normal html page (200) with their own fucking advertising (stealing our traffic & confusing our users) - I'm interested in knowing how you big site owners are handling this problem... any suggestion ?

[fetishbank]

As Xenu opens all the urls, the antivirus rings when it opens a page with malicious code and I can remove it immediately.

This is the first time ever I quote myself ! I made a mistake. Xenu does not open the pages, it just looks at the server response, so the antivirus won't find the problems. I get the alarms (if any problem) when running other programs...

[LipshtickLady]

Parked pages are sometimes a bit harder to discover as often they don't give back a 404 error or redirect (302) but send a normal html page (200) with their own fucking advertising (stealing our traffic & confusing our users) - I'm interested in knowing how you big site owners are handling this problem... any suggestion ?

this is the worst anathema on our industry - I have my VA check once every 60 days - time consuming, but her hourly rate is cheap and she does it in downtime between higher priority tasks.

[greenguy]

Parked pages are sometimes a bit harder to discover as often they don't give back a 404 error or redirect (302) but send a normal html page (200) with their own fucking advertising (stealing our traffic & confusing our users) - I'm interested in knowing how you big site owners are handling this problem... any suggestion ?

I used to pay people to do it. Back when I was making money, I'd pay $0.50 per link on the Link O'Rama. 1st time I had it done, there were 4000 links. Took my buddy about 2 weeks to basically make sure the sites were still there - no bot or script will ever be as good at checking sites as the human eye is.

When MrMaryLou started to work for me, we struck a deal: I'd pay for him to go to conventions (room, air, food money, etc) and in exchange, he'd just check links whenever he had free time.

I sure do miss him....

[vrocks]

The good ole' days!

[fetishbank]

I sure do miss him....

We all miss him. There's an empty gap nobody will ever fill... If one day somebody will write a book or make a movie about the begin of porn on the Internet the chapter related to link lists would be all for you, MrMaryLo and few others.

You're right about the human checking. Nothing can replace it. I get some reports from the users that help me to understand what "kind" of sites are potentially problematic. Then, need to go there and check one by one... sometimes me, sometimes my girfriend...

There's a trick that can be used to find parked/redirected page. There are some programs that donwload the Title tag of a page (or you can easily write your own). After you have got this long list of Titles (with their relative urls) you can browse the list and inspect the urls with "weird titles", no titles and title with a domain name only. Every domain parking company has its own automated way to name the parked pages...

Xenu + title check remove 90% of the crap with very few efforts. Then human work is required to make a quality job. I've to say things are much better now. There are maybe more sites diying, but less people who are playing dirty. I remember I had a so hard time dealing with tgp galleries redirecting to dialers (with geo redirect or activated after a certains number of clicks) that I was ready to close my tgp, then I solved the problem allowing only partners to post. Anyway, this is a sign of how deep is the crisis. I'm sure you noticed looking into your inbox that even the spammers are going out of business...