Digital Boomerang Singapore 

Outdated or broken links are a nightmare to manage. There is no two ways about it. We’ve got to keep links updated for two very important reasons:

1. We don’t want users to be frustrated.
2. We don’t want to hurt our search engine rankings.

Manually updating each and every link can be mind-numbing, especially when you have thousands of external links. Our content manager, has being doing just that for the past week, and she can tell you it’s no picnic.

The project Joy has been working on is built on Microsoft’s Content Management System (CMS) 2002. Unfortunately, there is no way to update a single broken link and direct the CMS to automatically update every mention of the same link.

We’re using a software known as Xenu to report all the broken links. Xenu is fast. Our site has over 800 pages about more than 2800 external links. Xenu trawls through the entire site in under 20 minutes. The Xenu report:

1. Lists the broken links
2. Lists the pages with these broken links

Armed with the Xenu report, Joy logs into the CMS to update the pages with the broken links. It’s still very much a labour intensive, time-consuming job. If only Xenu could update all the links for us too!

Does anyone have a better suggestion/way to take care of broken links? In the meantime, we’re going to have the empty those beer bottles in the fridge while we conjure up images of robots doing the job.

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