Maintaining the Blog: Bad Links

As a blogger I've noticed that as a post ages the risk of bad hyperlinks within it increases. Web sites reorganize, descriptions of old events are deleted, on-line newspaper articles disappear -- there are numerous reasons why any blog will eventually develop links that fail when the reader clicks on them.

Fortunately there is a free resource to track down bad links automatically. The paid version might be required for various reasons (the web site is over 3,000 pages, to export to Excel, etc.), but I've never needed it.

Here's an example screenshot from scanning my blog (click on the image to enlarge).

Now I must investigate each link and decide whether to replace, repair, remove, or ignore it. I don't worry about the timeout errors because I've discovered these are frequently routing errors somewhere deep in the Internet, and a request can stall at any of up to a dozen nodes on its way. It's not in my power to fix, and the flaw will disappear in a few weeks or months as network routing continually updates.

When I first ran the broken link checker, perhaps 18 months ago, it found almost 400 broken links from my decade of blogging. Now it's just a maintenance issue every six months or so, as above.