Check Your Links~~!!

Browsing around the web and found some old statistics from Search Engine Showdown. It is a short report about the dead links found in the famous search engines. You can have a look at here. Although the report is a few years ago already, it is still quite shocking. On average there is around 5% of dead links!

Dead links are really disgusting sometimes. For example, when you want to find a certain information on the web. After finding a few hours, you hardly got a link. However, it is dead… I am sure it is a disaster.

The presence of dead links have quite a number of reasons behind. e.g. the closure of a certain web, the typing errors, illegal link copying, etc. Are there any method to avoid them? The following are some tips.

1. Use more relative links.

   The meaning of relative links are links that referring to the current path instead of the root. e.g. For absolute link, we will have something like “http://www.cityu.edu.hk/image/logo.gif”. For relative, we will simply say “image/logo.gif”, assuming that your document is one level upper than the image folder.

   The advantage of relative link is that, even your web is transferred to a different domain, it still works. This is very useful for authors who usually edit the files locally and upload to server after editing.

2. Try not to link to other web’s file, copy them.

   We will not know or notice when the other web move the file away or rename it. So if we have web space, try to copy it down and link to the local copies.

3. Using some link validator.

   W3C Link Checker
   Dead-Links.com
   This will make the checking of dead links easier and faster.

Hope we will not see this in the future.