Linkpatch: 404 Error Alerts In Your Inbox

linklogoI recently moved my web site between platforms, which involved changing the URLs of the pages on the site. As a result, my life as a webmaster has become an ongoing hunt to find and fix broken incoming or internal links on the new site.

Linkpatch is a web app designed for people like me who are on a mission to find bad links. Once installed, it sends you an email whenever a user encounters a 404 (page not found) error page on your web site.

Installation

The most difficult part of using Linkpatch is installing the code for the tracking script on your web site. Linkpatch works in a similar way to a statistics package like Google Analytics, except that the tracking script is only installed on your site’s 404 page.

Linkpatch’s installation instructions assume you do not already have a custom 404 page on your site and shows you how to create one. My site already had a custom 404 page. This saved me the step of creating one, but made installing the script itself a little more complex.

The instructions from Linkpatch for installing the tracking script describe placing it in relation to certain HTML tags on the 404 page. Unfortunately, my page template was coded without using those tags. Using educated guesswork, I tried several positions for the code’s placement. The tracking script worked in the first position, but made the 404 page display as blank to visitors. Finally, I found a location where the script worked and didn’t disable the display of the page’s contents.

Usage

After installation, I started receiving emails notifying me when 404 errors were occurring. Notifications are limited to one for each referral per broken URL per day. This is good, because it means that one bad link won’t result in an avalanche of notifications in your inbox.

Linkpatch-Email

The error emails (contents pictured above) are extremely detailed. They include the broken address, the referral source (so you can see whether the broken link is on your site or elsewhere), and details on the user’s location, browser and operating system. There is also  the option of viewing the errors on the Linkpatch web site in a less detailed error log.

A very simple web dashboard (pictured below) controls Linkpatch. Through this dashboard, email delivery can be turned off if you’d prefer to only read your error reports online. Other available options, which I haven’t tried, include the blocking of recording of errors from certain directories or the ability to ignore errors that don’t have a referring page.

Linkpatch-Dashboard

Pricing

There are several levels of account available from Linkpatch. A free account is available that will monitor one site for errors. Premium accounts start at $10 per month for monitoring of up to five web sites, and go up to $75 per month for monitoring of up to 150 web sites. Discounts are available for paying annually. The free account that I tried took only a few minutes to set up, and didn’t require a credit card number.

Linkpatch has been very helpful in my hunt for broken URLs on my new site. If you’re concerned about hunting down broken links, Linkpatch is a great tool to employ.

What tools do you use for hunting down broken links?

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