How do you tell if there is a dead page with no links to it on your web site?

Question

How do you tell if there is a dead page with no links to it on your web site?

Answer 1

If you hover over the link with your mouse and it doesnt appear in the bottom of the screen as if it connecting.

Answer 2

One way is to write a program that sifts through all the page code on your site, extracts the references from all links and the names of all pages, and determines how many links there are to each.



I do analysis programs like this in Perl. On another forum, having to do with managing email lists, I can't mention Perl without somebody else complaining that I didn't mention Python. Moral: find a suitable language with which YOU are comfortable.



I frequently design the output of the programs to be itself an HTML page, usually with the data in tables but with references generated as links, so I can go from reading the data directly to examining the pages from which it was drawn.



Of course, if there's some specific page you think might be dead, you could just do a search through the site pages for references to that particular page.

Answer 3

Your problem is the opposite of broken links, which leads to error code 404. You are trying to identify orphan pages. These pages are seen on the backend but effectively inaccessible to the outside.



What you can do is to make a copy of your web site from the outside, store the files and get a listing, and compare it with your internal listing. A good tool to copy a website is http://www.download.com/HTTrack-Website-Copier/3000-12779_4-10039773.html?tag=mncol&cdlPid=10634972:

You can download the contents of entire Web sites from the Internet to a local directory for offline viewing.