Aman Software - Link Check Service

Our Service

We offer an inexpensive Link Checking Service to ensure that your site does not have any broken links. While Webmasters can run their own checks, using a program such as CyberSpyder Link Test, this is not always convenient or the best use of resources. In such cases, as another option, we can run the tests for you.

Results are returned to you via email attachments as one or more HTML pages.

The Linkrot Problem

Linkrot, or links becoming broken, has always been a problem on the World Wide Web. A survey done in 1998 found that, on average, nearly 6% of links are broken (see http://www.pantos.org/atw/35654.html). While we were unable to find any later general surveys, we did find some disturbing numbers:

Nelson and Allen (2002) examined link rot in digital libraries found that about 3% of the objects were no longer accessible after one year.
In a 2003 experiment, Fetterly et al. (2003) discovered that about 0.5% of web pages disappeared each week.
Benbow (1998) found an attrition rate for Web resources of 20% and 50% over two and three year periods.
University of Nebraska at Lincoln Wednesday, April 10, 2002 "Nineteen percent of the 515 hyperlinks contained in online materials for three graduate-level biochemistry courses at the university expired sometime between August 2000, when the course materials were created, and last month, the researchers found." After 20 months, 18.8 percent of the total links had disappeared. Over 11 percent of dot-org links, 18.4 percent of dot-edu pages and 42.5 percent of dot-com addresses were lost since the study began.
Like almost all large websites, Wikipedia also suffers from the phenomenon known as link rot, where external links go stale after a period of time. As of the November 6, 2006 database dump, Wikipedia contained 2,578,134 external links, and roughly 10% of these links are broken in some manner.
My own recent tests of 16 sites gave an average of almost 3% of the links being broken, with the actual range running from 0% to 6.5%.

You can see from these numbers that linkrot continues to be a problem and it is one of the most frustrating problems encountered by surfers. A broken link or two is often all it takes to cause a surfer to move on to another site or to cause a search engine spider fail to index some key portion of that site.

Pricing

Our basic pricing for checking links is 50 cents (US) per 1,000 links. On average, this works out to about 1 cent per page although that can vary from less than 1 cent to over 6 cents, depending on the average number of links per page for a particular site.

We cannot quote an actual price for testing a site until after the first test has been run (to establish the actual link count), therefore we offer to run the first test of a site free, up to a maximum of about 10,000 links. If this does not give a complete test of your site, the resulting report will give the number of pages involved so you will be able to estimate what the cost of testing the complete site would be based on your knowledge of the actual total number of pages.

We recommend that a site should be checked at least once per month at first (initially, maybe oftener if many broken links were found during the first test). The actual frequency for regular, ongoing testing can be adjusted after the first 3 or 4 months based on the actual rate of linkrot experienced for the particular site.

We expect payment in advance, based on the estimated final cost for the check. The minimum billing is $5.00US (equivalent to 10,000 links tested). Since this may represent several tests for a small site, there is also a minumum charge of $2.50US per report set emailed.

Please contact us if you are interested in a check of your site, have any questions, or would like more information - see our Contact page or use our Feedback Form.