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.

Sitemap Generation

I updated the html sitemap for interfacebus.com. This is the first update since the interfacebus-sitemap was up-loaded on 12/19/09. So I added in the last 22 web pages generated over the last few months, and removed a few more duplicate entries left over from when the page was generated.

I also went ahead and ran Xenu tonight to check for bad links. Looks like we have 99.17% good links out of 7,396 links. Seems I my have had about 10 bad links listed [which I have already fixed], I assume the other web sites will come back on line in a few hours ~ which is when I'll recheck them.

I'll go ahead and run the xml site-map generator over the week end. So the 22 odd new pages get included in that file and I can re-upload that file to Google. The last time the xml sitemap was generated was around 12/19/09 too.

Graphic; KC-135 Stratotanker Cockpit Instrument Panel [USAF Tanker].

Site Map

I ran Xenu last night to generate a new sitemap. The file size stated at better than 1.5 Meg and after many hours of work deleting many duplicate entries the size is dropped below 1Meg. I'm hoping to get it uploaded tonight, which would go well with this posting.

Of course I was doing other things as well; I added a few words to the Knol on Solid State Drives. Of course I added to the blog ~ with this posting. I also updated a few pages, which is normal;
RF Component vendors.
RF Power Divider vendors.
RF Phase Shifters, and so on just to name a few.
Google was telling me that the Phase Shifter page had a short meta description, so I updated a few RF pages.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overlay / Continent view.
Oh the map shows visits, but there have been 3,950,080 page-views so far this year.

Xenu Report, Statistics for Managers

I ran Xenu on interfacebus over the last hour. I run it on the off hours to keep my server happy, or at times when I expect low site visits. Normally I check for bad links every three months or so, but it eats up server bandwidth so not more than that. Plus the error rate is only 0.6% and most of those will turn up good later today.

Forbidden Request;
This just means when my spider hit the site, they return a no robots message. But I checked them and they all work. 
The resource is no longer available;
Yahoo Geocities closed down this year and I had one link off the Engineering Dictionaries page. I removed the link and reloaded the page.
Timeout;
Their server is slow; 3 out of the 5 sites are working now.
Temporarily  Overloaded;
Another slow server; three of the 4 sites are working.
Server Error;
I don't know what this means, two of the 3 sites are working.
No Object Data;
That's from Kaparel. First guess is he no longer exists...

The rest will not be rechecked today. After years of doing this I've learned not to wast my time checking and re-checking the same site. I'll give them a few days to come back on the web. However three of the 'Not Found' issues is from one of my pages which will be fixed today. It does appear that one of the 'Not Found' links on the VHDL Counter page is gone, if he doesn't come back in a few hours it will be deleted.

So of the 65 issues, 25 are good. Leaving 45 potentially bad sites out of 6885 doesn't sound so bad. Remember, most or all of those sites could pop back up later today as their server comes back online.
The other side of that is many of these companies reside on more than one page; for example a vendor might be listed with Battery Manufacturers, but also on the OEM vendor listing. Or maybe a company manufacturers SSTL ICs and LVTTL parts.....

Anyway the site appears healthy; also, the highest number of visits for a M, T, W, or R occurred this month. Not sure why Friday is lagging and I'm not really tracking the week ends.
Graphic; Xenu report summary. Click for a larger image.

Web Pages Updates and Graphics

Following last weeks running of Xenu to check for 'bad' links, many of the re-directed links have been up-dated. Remember, links that are re-directed are not broken...

During this same time graphic files from my Google Page Creator site are being moved to a new storage location. To reduce server bandwidth many picture files are stored out on Google Page Creator, and not on the interfacebus server. But, Google is closing that 'beta' program so a new storage location needs to be found. Errors can occur while up-dating the html code as the pic file addresses are up-dated. Xenu will need to be run ounce again to find any of these new errors.

The Google Page Creator site also held html pages which need to be relocated. Google has a new html generation program called Google Sites. Today I added nine new pages to Google Sites, which are copies of the old Google Page Creator program. All of the new pages added today really just hold a graphic, like the previous site, but the graphic was deleted from Page Creator in favor of a link to the new page.

I'm still not happy that instead of fixing Google Page Creator, they decided to close the sites. I started my site in 2006, that's 2 years of generating a 'page rank' and other people finding my pages and linking to me. This mentality of keeping all services as beta, for years, is BS. My pages were 'in addition' to my main site, supporting the site ~ what about those people that started an on-line bussiness using Page Creator?

Here is the new address for the new site interfacebus, hit the sitemap link on the left menu bar to see all the pages. Again, these pages only hold a graphic, and their new. No pages link to them and there are no page to page links, other than the sitemap. Any page on the main site 'interfacebus.com' will still be linking to the older site.

I've also completed a few Knols in the last few weeks, but I'm not sure how to indicate how to find them. Google seems to be .... what? I don't get it. Search "knol" on Google, then search "RS232" ~ you will then find that knol, with links to the other knols; hint [RS-232].

There are many redirects

Was it just yesterday when I indicated I didn't need to run Xenu? What was I thinking with that comment? That program just found a number of link re-directs that indicate a company (website) has been taken over by another company. I don't worry and seldom correct redirects from links that move from 'what.com' to 'what.com/eng' companies do that crap all the time. But, the ones I noted seemed to move from one company to another companies web site ~ I guess times are hard all over.

The report contains a number of sections, and 're-directs' is just one of those reports. I fixed the 'bad' ones and saved the others. I did not review the "bad links" section; because, mostly that just means the site is down. I did find three sites that were redirected to the server which is not good. When a site redirects to the server that is running ads it means the site is history ~ those links were removed.

Many of these sites were already linked from my site as 'rel=no follow', which means I was telling the search engines not to follow the links, or the link is not really there (to the computer) so my site does not get pinged.

I'll never understand why some companies re-direct so often, it's like they don't get the book-mark button. One company e-mailed me a few years ago; you must change the link on this page to 'what-ever.com' [it's important]; ok; but, by the way your linked on a dozen other pages as this, and this, and this company ~ ! There is one company that always stands out over the last few years, well really two companies that always have bad links ~ I just delete them now. Why link to some one if you can't find what your looking for, or you get a 404 [page not found code].

Our incoming visits are reduced, so let's change our address so people can no longer find us. What? Yea we don't need all the sites that link to use, our page rank or any incoming links from other pages, the 'bad link we'll make us better......


Who runs these sites or their web masters? Somebody just does not get it.

Time to spider the site again

This week end I'll run the Xenu spider again to check for bad links. Some time after that I'll run the GsiteCrawler to generate an xml site map to upload to Google web-master tools [after I fix any issues found by the Xenu crawler]. I never run a crawler during normal office hours, as they put a strain on the server. Both Crawlers have to check each page on the server; or 1523 active pages and 209 inactive pages.

I've updated 1,440 pages since the Xenu program was run, but most have been html up-dates [a few gif files may be included in that count]. However; I've hand checked most pages over that time so I should not find that many issues. I was running the spider program once a month, but it seemed to miss a few issues so I've been hand checking links. The last check by the program indicated 5,978 links

Twenty new pages were added to the site since 6/7/08, so it's about time for a Google site map via GsiteCrawler. There may be a few page-to-page link updates that have been made as well, but not many ~ should make a more up to date site-map regardless.

Most of the page up-dates are due to one or more of these issues [most updated at the same time / page]:

Java script code change for Google Analytics [page visit counter]
Java script code change for Google Ads
Removal of all Java Script code for Google Referral Ads [program terminated]
Removal of two different meta tags [html coding issues, redundant un-required code]
Re-direct gif links as Google pages go out of service [Google web site terminated]
Java script code change for the Google Search Bar [ Code up-date, but not required]
Non-US ['dot'com] pages getting the html rel 'no follow' code [html non visible change]

The attached pic is of a Georgia map indicating 188 visits from that country so far this year. Russia just invaded them.....

Link checking and SEO stuff

Hmm, I've been hand checking some pages and have found some bad links on the web site. Maybe I rely to much on Xenu to check the links on the site.

I see some old re-directs that have been fixed, just to clear the redundant listings. But what I'm more concerned about are the dozen pages found that point to the isp, indicating that the web site is gone. I assume that the Xenu robot does not detect those changes ...... That's not good. Still a few bad links out of 5,000 isn't that bad.

New Site Uploaded

I spent the last few days fixing the site map that is generated from running Xenu. The generated site map starts with a great many redundant page listings, so I have to go in and remove a lot of them. The current page size for the sitemap is 505kB, while the one already on the web is 462kB.

I'll go ahead and upload the new map and up-date over the rest of the week. My system indicates 1143 html files [pages], as does Google. Google indicates I have 1444 indexed urls, and a total of 1606 total URLs. The difference is due to a number of orphan pages that capture misspelled page addresses.

Any way the 80 odd pages that were generated over the last few months are now part of the sitemap, and now have an external page link that points to them.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization [SEO] is the process of configuring or setting up your web site so that it is search engine friendly. It really accounts for much more than that by insuring that a web page ranks high in a search result via key word placement. "Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site." I practice SEO; I make sure the title or page address relates to the topic, insure the first paragraph describes the topic and so on.

Any way, I just ran the program Xenu to validate the links on the site. The robot found only four bad links, and a ton of redirects. I don't think many of these companies practice SEO. They seen to change web names, redirect to a new address for awhile and than go back to the old address.... I really don't get it. I don't even list a few companies any longer because I continue to see dead pages as they keep changing their page addresses...

I should be up-loading a new sitemap tomorrow once I get a chance to delete some of the redundant listings in the report. I also ran Gsitecrawler and generated an XML sitemap for the search engines, Google is still checking it.

On a side note, the web site seems to be going well. Download speed is being increased by deleting HTML comments, or breaking up large pages into smaller pages ~ and making the pages more focused on one particular topic. Adding a search bar to all the pages, so the site may be searched from any page. Changing the search bar so that it defaults to a website search and not the web [some pages had search bars that searched the web, while some defaulted to searching the site which could be a little confusing. I also continue to add more pages, better than 80 pages in the last four months. Google now indicates 1606 URLs submitted.

Site / Server bandwidth remains at 57kB/visits, but I think the savings from reducing the html comments is being off-set by adding the search bar to the hundred's of pages that did not have one.

Not really web site related, but I've been trading out the older google referral links in favor of their new referral code. The newest code selects one of a hundred ads, while their old code would only run google related products ~ Adwords, firefox and so on. Plus the html code is smaller in most cases as one referral link may replace three other older google referrals.

Jan 2008 was the best month ever in terms of visits, and from the site history this month should be even better. March is higher than Jan, while Feb is lower January. New content is always being added, and html coding mistakes are fixed as they are found. ~ All is well

Xenu's Link Sleuth

I ran Xenu today checking for bad links. Here is part of the full report:

ok	5758 URLs	99.21%
user skip	1 URLs	0.02%
no such host	11 URLs	0.19%
not found	8 URLs	0.14%
no info to return	1 URLs	0.02%
server error	2 URLs	0.03%
no connection	9 URLs	0.16%
no object data	1 URLs	0.02%
forbidden request	7 URLs	0.12%
timeout	4 URLs	0.07%
the resource is no longer available	1 URLs	0.02%
auth required	1 URLs	0.02%
Total	5804 URLs	100.00%