Checking your Website for broken links

InternetPeriscope can help you check your website for broken links.

Over time, you may find that your website has links to other websites that no longer exist. Alternatively, if you remove a page that is no longer needed from your website, you may forget to update the pages that link to the old, deleted page. When a user clicks on one of these "dead" links, they will get an error message.

To analyze your website for broken links, click on the "Tools" menu, move your mouse over the "website" submenu, and click on "Check website for broken links", as shown in the figure below.


A dialog box appears, prompting you for the website hostname. Enter your websites name in the box as shown below:


InternetPeriscope will begin checking your website for bad links, and display the dialog shown

• At the top of the dialog box is a status message, that shows you which webpage is currently being checked for errors.


• Below the status message is a read-only edit control that lists any errors that have been found. In the current figure, no errors have yet been found.


• Below the error messages is a listbox that shows the names of all of the webpages that have been checked so far.


• Below the list of urls is a list of urls that InternetPeriscope could not check. For example, InternetPeriscope has no way of checking "mailto" links, so it lists them here. These links can be checked manually by clicking on one of the links in the listbox to select it, and then clicking on the "Open URL" button located at the bottom of the dialog.
• At the bottom of the listbox are a list of "foreign urls". These are urls that your webpages have links to, but these pages are not part of your website, they are part of another organization's website, hence the name "foreign". InternetPeriscope checks to make sure that these pages are reachable, but it does not check them for errors.


• At the bottom of the dialog is an "Open URL" button. If you click on an entry in one of the listboxes, or select some text in the Error textbox, you can then click on this button to open the URL in question.


• You can use the "Stop" button to stop the check of further urls. If you click on "Stop", you will be given a chance to view the results of the scan, but InternetPeriscope will not continue checking urls.


• Click on the "Done" button to remove the dialog from the screen.