Link Scanning

In an effort to help you keep your content accurate for your end users we have created a link checking tool that will periodically run a check on the articles, events and pages on your site. It will check if the content you are linking to is a valid link and if so, that there is a proper http request associated with that link.  The first sweep will catch incorrect links.

The second part of the sweep, assuming it found no formatting problems, attempts to make a connection to the link and will return an error if it is unable to make a connection or the site it attempts to connect to returns as a 404 error. A 404 error means that the site can't find the page you are looking for.

Please note that the scan also looks "beneath the surface." This means that the scan looks at the underlying HTML code on the page so if you have a link in a html id tag or other place that shows up in the HTML but is not visible on the page it will still find and point out these broken links. The reason we do this is to be 508 compliant as many of the screen reader programs used by individuals with visual impairments look at these tags and links that may not be visible on the webpage. If you are unable to find a broken link on a page where one is being reported look at the HTML for links being hidden in there. This often occurs when just copying and pasting links from other locations. You can look at the HTML through the WYSIWYG by clicking "Tools" and selecting "Source Code" as shown below:

NOTES:

• The sweep will occasionally yield false positives and incorrectly report that there is an error in a link. This can happen because the website was momentarily down when the sweep occurred or there was heavy traffic on the website.
• The sweep does not verify the content of the links, just that the links are valid. So if you meant to add a link to an article on the habits of highly effective students on the Washington Post but instead linked to facebook, it will only tell you that the link itself works