External Link Management

[dowei]

I am a newbie so please be kind.

My company has many links to a state agency on our web site. About every 18 months they change their site and the pages are still there but have new urls so none of our links work.

I have been asked to research whether there is any way that we can automatically check links (I know that there are ways to check for bad links) and then update or redirect to the new page on the external site?

I really did not think this could be done without a lot of human intervention but if anyone knows anything to the contrary, I would be very grateful.

[toicontien]

There's really nothing you can do outright, however, there are some things you can do to get the site operators to make your life easier:

1) Ask if they can set up server redirects from old pages to new pages.

2) Suggest they stop changing the freaking URLs because many people link to their pages, and that it's imperative the URLs don't change. There's no reason the URLs should change. It's just bad design and planning. Shoddy work.

But really nothing you can automate.

[dowei]

Thanks for the information. It really confirms what I thought. I do wish government sites would use the same etiquite that they demand of their vendors. I don't think I could tell them to do anything that they would listen to. Very, very bad form.

[PineSolPirate]

You might be able to use some PHP , like Snoopy (http://sourceforge.net/projects/snoopy/) or, if you have it cURL (http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php) to try and pull back a header with an error code (if there is one) but I don't know about updating automatically. at best you could auto-disable links that were bad.

[dowei]

Thanks for the info