Fighting Broken Links

Online surfing suffers from broken links. They pollute the web. The best way to prevent these annoying “thorns” is to reduce making them. We have to cope with the recklessness behind manufacturing them. Taking the problem personally and seriously means finding ways to bypass the need for links, which work perfectly until they break for some reason. For instance: Instead of linking to Wikipedia in order to mention a source of a quote it might be enough to refer to the heading of the entry, which is usually a unique keyword.

In order to fix broken links I have to click on every single link on my large web site. When the link doesn't work or works too slowly I ask myself if I can delete it. Most of the times the answer is positive, and I ask myself why did I make the links from the start.

It might seem too tedious to fix all these broken links one by one without using any software, but I can tell you that after a while I found patterns that gradually helped me find shortcuts.

I don't believe in solutions from “above” (that Google would encourage us, up loaders, to use less links and rank higher). I even don't mind if nobody else but me genuinely thinks that it's worth the time to fix broken links. I'm just convinced that's what I have to do without delay, and I share it with those who read this.

Tip 1: remember that a link is only a highlighted text. If you have a lot of broken links on one of your pages you may consider canceling the highlights (copy the document to MS Word with the Special Paste command unformatted text). Without highlights a link becomes regular text and no one can break it.

Tip 2: consider writing textual (not highlighted) links. Readers who will be really interested in following these links will have to make the (copy and paste) effort.

Tip 3: avoid links to PDF files, which download too slowly.

Tip 4: avoid dynamic links.

QTSaver Demonstration, Tribal Tattoos

See a demonstration of multiple QTSaver Queries about Tribal Tattoos resulting as an article I sent to tattooblogger.

I started with the Keyword Tribal Tattoos and proceeded to other Keywords that I stumbled upon such as:

African tattoos, Bengal tattoos, Berber tattoos, China tattoos and so on.

I arranged the results in Microsoft Word Levels and eventually the headings by alphabetic order.

It took me about 4 hours.

Hotlinking

Demonstration of the power of Qtsaver micro content search engine to grab relevant info from multiple sources and present it on one page.

1. http://altlab. com/hotlinking. html What is Hotlinking? Bandwidth Theft? Stop Hotlinking and test your . . .
• Did you receive a notice that you are hotlinking an image on someone else's server and warned to stop doing it immediately?Would you like to test image hotlink protection on your own web site? Would you like to prevent hotlinking of your image files with an htaccess file?
• Bandwidth theft or "hotlinking" is direct linking to a web site's files (images, video, etc. ). An example would be using an img tag to display a JPEG image you found on someone else's web page so it will appear on your own site, eBay auction listing, weblog, forum message post, etc.
• Hotlinking can have a lot of undesirable consequences. One is the so-called "switcheroo". If you've linked to an image on someone's server, what's to prevent them from changing the image you linked to?
2. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Inline_linking Inline linking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Inline linking (also known as hotlinking, leeching, piggy-backing, direct linking, offsite image grabs and bandwidth theft) is the use of a linked object, often an image, from one site into a web page belonging to a second site. The second site is said to have an inline link to the site where the object is located.
• For Microsoft's Internet Information Services web server software, third party tools may be installed to combat inline linking and hotlinking.
3. http://altlab. com/htaccess_tutorial. html Stop Hotlinking with htaccess. Test your Image Hotlink Protection with . . .
• So You Want to Stop Hotlinking and Bandwidth Theft
• Want to test image hotlink protection for your web site? Here is information on using an htaccess file to stop hotlinking and bandwidth theft.
• You can stop others from hotlinking your site's files by placing a file called . htaccess in your Apache site root (main) directory. The period before the name means the file is hidden, so you may want to edit your file as htaccess. txt, upload it to your server, then rename the txt file to . htaccess in your directory. Contact your web host on how to access your directories and configure your . htaccess file.
4. http://www. imagehotlinking. com Your Guide to Preventing Image Hotlinking
• It is quite possible that people new to webpages may be engaging in the practice of image hotlinking without realizing it.
• If the image is coming from a site that isn't yours, it's considered hotlinking or inline linking. To solve this, save a copy of the image yourself (assuming you have permission to do so), upload it to your web server, and link to it from there. Alternatively, you can upload it to the numerous free image hosting sites available around the net.
• Legal Action - Hotlinking to images and other multimedia can be considered intellectual property theft, and can open the perpetrator to legal action. This method of prevent hotlinking however, it is expensive and time consuming, and won't necessarily prevent others from trying the same thing.
5. http://www. free-webhosts. com/definition/hotlinking. php Definition: Hotlinking (hot linking)
• This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth of the hotlinked file, but often is intellectual property theft. The term is also used loosely (a misnomer) by free image hosts which allow you to store images on their server and allow you to direct link the hosted image files on forums or other websites (sometimes altering the image to have a watermark).
• One of the most common occurrences of "hot linking" is when people are forum posting and they hotlink pictures from another website to use as avatars or signature images on the messageboards (forums). Some disadvantages of hot linking worth considering are that the webpage generally loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web hosting server than the webpage is hosted on, and the owner of the image has full control to disable hotlinking, or delete, rename, or worse yet, do a "switcheroo" (i. e. , switching the file name to be another image which is sure to cause the hotlinker embarrassment) of the hot-linked image. Common methods of preventing hotlinking are by using an . htaccess file, using the "Hotlink Protection" offered in control panels such as Cpanel, or simply renaming image files periodically.
6. http://www. static8. com/hotlink. html Static8 Hotlinking is Bad
• Hotlinking can quickly put a big dent in allowed bandwidth. Quite often, images are hotlinked from forums and discussion boards. . . if it's a large image, and the forum is popular, the site being hotlinked could be shut down or charged for the extra bandwidth in just a few hours.
• More importantly, hotlinking is a copyright crime. A hotlinker is displaying someone else's art on a site not affiliated with the artist.
7. http://www. xentrik. net/htaccess/hotlinking. php Xentrik | Htaccess | Hotlinking
• You hear people with websites complaining about hotlinking all the time. It has a number of names besides hotlinking, such as leeching, direct linking and bandwidth stealing. The problem is, the majority of offenders don't realise what they're doing, or that it's stealing at all.
• So how can you tell if you're hotlinking? Take a look at your HTML code. If the code for your image looks like this: img src="http://www.xentrik. net/image.gif" Then you are hotlinking to an image on http://www.xentrik.net, and using up that siteowner's data transfer, which is wrong.

Google Pages

QTSaver Daily Search results for Google Pages

Another demonstration of the power of this micro content search engine to grab relevant info from multiple sources and present it on one page

1. http://pages. google. com/-/about. html About Google Page Creator

o We're testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There's no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yoursitename. googlepages. com for the world to see.

o Will Google give preferential treatment to web pages created with Google Page Creator in Google search results?

o If you're interested in testing out the product, please visit http://pages. google. com and sign in using your Gmail account to begin making pages.

o preferential treatment of any kind in Google search results.

2. http://google. about. com/od/googleproducts/g/pagesdef. htm Page Creator

o Definition: Google Page Creator is a Google Labs project to generate and host simple HTML web pages with images.

3. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Google_Page_Creator Google Page Creator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

o Google launched a product called Google Sites in February 2008. It is unclear whether these two products lines will each remain, or whether Google Pages will get phased out.

4. http://www. techcrunch. com/2006/02/22/google-pages-released Google Pages Released

o Although there has been no official announcement yet Google have released the long awaited and long-rumored Google Pages (which has nothing to do with cloning Larry Page). Pages allows users to create a web page using an AJAX interface that removes a lot of the ‘pain’ associated with creating pages with HTML and other desktop design applications.

o Once you are in the application you are presented with a WYSIWYG interface displaying your page and some editing controls. The interface in terms of what they have done with client-side Javascript is impressive, and what Google has done in terms of putting up simple pages is cool but overall it is an underwhelming gimmick that may have some potential if they focus. Google Pages allows you to upload files, create many pages that you can link up, and select from a smorgasbord of templates. The website which you can then push out to publish can then be found at username. googlepages. com.

o The way it usually works with real website design is that the design wraps the content creator up completely simply so they don’t mess things up – only because we aren’t all creative types. Google Pages does let you upload any file though, and gives you 100MB of space, which some may find more useful for sharing files or distributing SNL video’s.

o For instance, this is not going to be a threat to the younger crowd who are all creating pages on MySpace, nor to the audience of millions of bloggers who already have their online presence, nor to the players in the CMS space who offer a whole lot more in functionality and power. I am not sure who this is targeted at as the small business owners and non technical folk sure aren’t looking at Google for a website solution and considering there is no domain mapping at the moment being a business and handing out a googlepages.com domain is just, well, embarrassing.

5. http://www. desktoplinux. com/news/NS2909568909. html Google Pages launches

o Google released the first public beta of its Google Pages service Wednesday, allowing users who signed up for the service in January and February to begin creating personal websites using an easy-to-use, browser-based tool. The service gives each user 100 MB of free storage space on Google's servers.

o To use the Google "Page Creator" tool, users must have an existing Google account. However, only those who signed up early (in January and February) to use Google Pages have access to the current beta. No new signups are being accepted at this time, Google said. The company is expected to open Page Creator to more widespread use over the next few weeks.