Link Checking

Just a quick note to indicate that the links on the engineering site have just been checked and verified. There were a few bad links, but not that many. I still have some sites to check within the next few days, but I need to give the web sites time to come back on-line.

The attached graphic shows the data generated by Xenu. It appears that at a minimum there were 99.29% good links on the site, and that number should increase as I check the rest on the remaining links in the report.

The last time I showed this report was in November 20 2009 as Xenu Report, Statistics for Managers. That report shows 99.25% good links, with a total number of URL links as 6950 URLs

Of course there is one day remaining in the month, but the site numbers look kind of low. Today should not be any different because the site never does well on holidays. This will be the lowest performing month of the year, still better than any month of any previous year. But I should be posting those numbers tomorrow, as my server counter does not up-date until about 5am.

Of course if you have off-page links on your site you should always check them to insure they point to a valid page address. I use a free link checking program called Xenu.

As a side note; the site visits so far this year have past all of the visits for the entire 2005 year.

Incoming visitors from Forums

I was just checking Google Analytics data on Referring Sites, or sites that send visitors to interfacebus.com [not the home page]. I noticed that I get many more incoming visitors from on-line forums then I do News Groups. I always figured the News Groups sent in a lot of traffic because every other day someone posts a link to me in one of the threads. Now I realize that when I search Google News Groups, that they post forum links as well. News groups have been on the decline for a decade any way, once the web turned into what it is now.

The chart shows 34,262 visits from 529 different sources [forums]. The news groups only sent in 1,921 visitors during the same period. This year forum traffic accounted for 10,948 visits. Now none of that traffic is from me, I don't post in forums. But it is a nice way to get some free advertising, and they may end up coming back again because about 70% are new visitors to the site [really 80%]. Better yet those posting stay out there forever, so once someone links to me I still might get a hit years later.

Related Posts;
Referring Sites; 6/13/08
Referring Sites; 5/3/08
Why do I need backlinks; 3/14/08
Graphic; Referring Sites, filtered for "Forum", per week.

Zenu Link Checking

I ran Zenu on the web site today to check for bad links. To my surprise I found over a dozen bad links, and I have yet to finish checking all the links from the report.

The report from Zenu provides dozens of so call bad links, but many are just sites that just don't answer fast enough or sites that don't allow robots to check them. In either case I have to hand check all those links. The report indicated 6496 URL links that were ok, or 98% of the links. Some 27 links were reported as 'Bad', or 0.4%. However in some cases a bad link may reside on more than one page, so I've uploaded 18 pages to correct the bad links.

In addition to correcting a few bad links I also fixed a few re-directs, so the link points to the new page with out having the browser do the redirect. I did notice that many of my links that pointed to many internal Intel pages were no longer working; I ended up deleting those links.

Never really understand why a web master would cause a link to go bad. I just don't see how that helps a web site. In any case Intel just lost a few incoming links. The section of the web site with the largest number of bad links was Interface Bus Descriptions. Followed by the section covering Electronic Component Manufacturers.

Zenu also generates a sitemap so over the week end I'll be uploading a new site map to cover all the new pages that have been added to the web site over the last few months.

The correct name for Zenu is Zenu Link Sleuth and of 4/25/09 they have a new version of the program for download [version 1.3c].

The attached graphic is produced from Google Analytics and has nothing to do with Zenu. Click on the pic file for a larger image.

External Web Linking

Here is a listing of web page addresses with only one external page link from another web site. In most cases the external link is really coming from the web site's sitemap, which is located on another server.

The list only indicates a total of 1,032 pages, while the main sitemaps page indicates 1,414 URLs.

How to Derate a Connectors.

Limiting the maximum current used by connector pins.

How to Derate Power Supplies.

How to Derate Switches.

Manufacturers of DC-to-DC Converter ICs.

A list of Voltage Converter IC vendors.

Joystick for the Apple IIc computer.

An out dated interface on the Apple Computer.

PC104 Board Dimensions.

Graphic of PC-104 card.

Manufacturers of Embedded Backplanes.

Industrial or non-commercial Back-Planes.

Listing of Single Board Computer Form Factors.

Sizes of SBC formats.

Manufacturers of Cable Clamps.

Companies that produce cable clamps.

Strain Relief Manufacturers.

Definition of Gray Code.

Hex Symbol Table.

Some of these pages should have showed up in the 'what's new blog' in addition to the sitemap, but must be missing. Having external web links help increase the page ranking of the page being linked to. But the page linking in needs to have a page rank of its own.

Checking Active Links

I just ran the robot spider to check all the links on my site. Things look pretty good, I had 5,985 links with only about a dozen bad links.

With a site like this one you always have to be sure the links are good and active. To many bad links and the search engines will penalize the site. So I deleted the bad links, and up-dated the pages as required.

Of course the site has hundreds of pages that do not have any external links at all ...

I did take the time to update a few pages, and I came across a few more pages that did not have a Google search bar:

Optical Transport Networks,
Gigabit Ethernet,
Ethernet in the First Mile.

All three pages are related to the Ethernet Bus. I also find that the Ethernet in the First Mile page has no page rank. Yet another page that has been out there for a year with no ranking. Granted it has no content, but give me a break here!

Any way, odds seem pretty good that no one finds a non-active link

No external Links

Other than my site map which is located out in Google page Creator, there are a number of internal pages with no external sites linking to them. I really see no difference between an external link or an internal link and I don't think the search engines care either, a link is a link.

However depending on a pages content, there are only so many pages that can cross link to similar content within my web site. So in that regard I am concerned about pages with few external links.

Here are some examples:
ATX Riser Cards.
Commercial Standard Communications Bus.
Intermediate Bus Architecture.
Interbus.
Microwire.
X-by-Wire.

There may be a few dozen other pages with only one link, but these are all bus related. Dealing with interface buses, which is what the site is geared to. I did note that many pages with few external links were new pages to the site. How ever the pages listed here are not new, they have been listed for months if not years.

The ATX Riser card only has one internal link as well.... So does the Apple RS232 bus.