Prevent Link Rot in your Published Workby Barbara J. Feldman<-- Previous Page | ||||||||
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Using URL redirection has another benefit. You will get complete reporting on which links are being clicked on, and which are not. If you write (or create information products) for a living, this is valuable market information. Look at these reports carefully, and you'll better understand what your readers are interested in! Here are three redirect scripts. Don't be confused by the fact that these products are being sold as tools for managing advertising campaigns. The people that created them were marketers, and just didn't realize that authors and publishers would also need their products.
Installation notes: Both AdTrackZ and ProLinkz require a UNIX server, with Perl 5 and the ability to run CGI scripts. If you do not have a Web host that meets these specs, try ClickThruStats or ask AdTrackZ to host the script on their server for free! Which one is for you? I've used them all, and found them all easy to install and use. AdTrackZ offers an important feature not found in ProLinkz: the ability to categorize URLs by type or group. Add a new type for each book or article, and you have an easy to way to track all the URLs from a single publication. To do this in ProLinkz, you will need to install the script into multiple directories (such as /yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/book1/ and /yourdomain.com/cgi- bin/book2/ .) The other unique feature in AdTrackZ is the ability to use .htm links (such as
http://www.preventlinkrot.com/adt.htm ) instead of .cgi links (such as
http://www.preventlinkrot.com/cgi-bin/a/t.cgi?adt ). Click on Redirects to automatically create
and upload the required pages to use this style of link. This is also possible with ProLinkz, but
you will need to create and upload the redirecting .htm pages yourself. ProLinkz does not create
them for you.
Of course you can manually check each link in your document, but here's a timesaving tip. The easiest way to
check your links is to create a webpage for each document (article or book) that contains all of your links.
This page doesn't have to be fancy, as the public will never see it; it can even be hosted on a free web server.
Use a text editor to create a list of links in HTML format as follows:
When you find the new URL, simply fire up your browser and use the administration module of
your redirect script to replace the rotten link with the fresh one. I like choices two and three. When citing an example or recommending a resource, I would make a site substitution when appropriate. But I would refer readers to a page on my site when I felt that the readers needed more information. This would entail writing an explanation page ("Company XYZ no longer offers this service, but I've found that Company ABC offers widgets that are compatible with the services provided by Company DEF.") and redirecting your readers back to this page on your site. That's it! With just a little effort, you can now keep your published work valuable for years to come. Now isn't that easier than publishing errata pages, and having to republish new editions every six months? I think so. I hope you've found this information valuable. In closing, here's a bit of Net lingo trivia for
you: Jakob Nielsen is credited with either inventing or popularizing the term "link rot" in
his 1998 article "Fighting Linkrot".
<-- PREVENT LINK ROT
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Tell a colleague about "Prevent Link Rot"