Broken links to your live site
This topic should be useful to u3as moving their site to SiteWorks, but works equally well as a way to find out who is linking to your site. Some external links may link deep into your site to pages that no longer exist.
If you move house it is usual to get the Post Office to redirect post for a limited time to your new abode. After that, Post Office mail is unlikely to reach you and may well be returned to the sender. The Internet equivalent of this is website address redirection. When redirection expires you get broken links where a browser says it can’t reach a site or page not found.
Redirection to your SiteWorks site can be done through your ISP or domain registrar, for SiteWorks sites this will be a 301 redirect. If this can’t be done then results from search sites (Google et al) will point to your new site within days but will need to be seeded by setting up links from other sites (SiteWorks oversights for example).
For external Websites to update their links then they need to be notified. Redirection will not help if the links go deep into your old site.
Identify links to your old or current URL
You can use your preferred search engine to locate the links to your Site Builder site.
Go to the home page of the search engine (google.com, bing.com etc.) and type in the body of your URL. For example,
anytownu3a.org.uk
Do not do this in the address bar of your browser as it will just search rather than list links.
The results will list sites with link(s) to the URL If the URL is to your old site check each result and decide how important and practical it is to contact site owners with a request to update links to your SiteWorks site.
If the URL is to your SiteWorks site scroll down past links internal links. Then check that any deep links to pages of media on your site (that said they can be tedious to locate).
Some specific sites to check:
- Notify your Network u3a and/or Regional u3a site admins
- If you are registered with the Charity Commission their contact information needs updating
- Check local community organisations, councils etc. although these should show up in your search results.
- If you use Beacon, then update the System setting’s u3a Home page (this won’t be picked up by the search)