Paul Holstein Weblog at Web Analytics Demystified

Paul Holstein is Co-Founder, Vice President and COO of CableOrganizer.com, Inc., now among the world's leading purveyors of cable and wire management-related products. In these capacities, Holstein oversees the company's strategic planning and day-to-day company operations, including web analytics and multivariate testing.

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Those Annoying 404 Errors

Few things drive me more nuts than broken links.  Especially when those links are on your own site.  Here you are with a real live person browsing your site.  They are engaged and click on a link to learn more or purchase an item when, anticlimactically, they get a 404 page not found error.  Another form of this problem is almost as bad.  You have a beautiful page that’s supposed to have great images on it, but some or all of them are replaced by white boxes with x’s in the corner.  Yuck.

Nothing screams “amature” more than broken links.  404 pages are some of the most destructive pages or elements you can have on a site yet they are often one of the easiest things to find and fix.

Here’s how we attack ours:

  1. First, we crawl our own site weekly.  We use a program called Web Link Validator.  In addition to crawling your site for broken links, it also looks at spelling and can create site maps for you.  There are a lot of programs just like it available on the web today.  If your site uses static html anywhere on it, I would recommend crawling your own site on a regular basis.
  2. Every time a browser encounters a broken link, I get an e-mail.  That’s right.  I had our developers program our site to send me an e-mail if a 404 error is generated from a page on our site.  This has saved our bacon several times between crawls when we didn’t realize we had a problem.  Suddenly, my e-mail box was filling with error reports.  It’s a great help.
  3. Finally, we analyze our logs.  Page tagging solutions such as Omniture will only tell you about broken links to pages.  If you want to see your broken links to images, you need to look at the log files.  This can get a bit tricky if you are using a CDN (Content Delivery Network), such as Akamai, but to combat this, the CDN will usually provide its own reports to help you.

Given the tools available, there is no need for you to ever suffer major problems with broken links.

Post Date:
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Categories:
General Web Analytics
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June Dershewitz added the following ...

Hi Paul. Are we on the same wavelength or what!? I wrote about the same topic on my blog last week:

http://june.typepad.com/june/2008/07/the-dreaded-404-not-found-three-ways-to-find-broken-links.html

Good point about using log analysis to catch broken links to images (works for style sheets, too).

Thought added on August 5th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

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