Cleaning up my outbound links

by Sapphire (November 16, 2005)

I’ve been going through my directories lately, and also my article reprint sites, examining all my outbound links. And I realized something: even if they’re fine when you first post them, that doesn’t mean they will be 6 months from now.

For my articles sites, I’m now putting together a list of every outbound link I have as I check them, and noting what date they were last checked. I’m keeping this in a private* blog where I log stuff like that. (*Private, meaning: in a password protected directory with registration disabled, 2 Rottweilers guarding the server, and some C-4 on the door, triggered to go off if anyone looks at it funny. Me? Paranoid? :D) I’ll add new ones as I post articles, and have a continually updated link to check every now and then. And why?

Because in going through 100 outbounds so far, I’ve found numerous 404’s, a couple of dead links, a couple of scraper sites, and one site whose index page is just a download of… something. You click it, and it tries to download something to your computer. Not really something I want to be linking to.

This is all a huge pain, of course. I’m still looking for a script that will extract all my outbounds for me and put them in a nice clickable little list, so I can automate at least that much of the process. I’m sure somebody will come up with something that does the trick eventually. Until then… I think it’s worth the hours of annoying work.

I think as I get better at knowing what to look for, I’ll be able to rule out a lot of these guys before I ever post their articles in the first place. So if I can recheck them all every 3-4 months, I’m thinking that might be frequent enough to stave off problems with the SE’s.

My directories are another story. There’s nothing for those but to just go through and double-check by hand. None of my scripts do stuff like eliminating all subdomain links for me. They can check for broken links, and recips (which I don’t require) and that’s about it.

Webmasters need someone to invent a real-life R2D2. That’d be sweet.