Outdated links on 3rd party websites or search engines are bad for the webmaster and visitor. Most of the time these error’s are handled by some default error page or by some custom code provided via the hosting control panel. Today we discussed at Webdigity the use of a custom error page script with some additional features:

• Report error’s with important server/client information by e-mail to the webmaster
• check 404 errors against a list of known URL’s with bad links
• check for IP addresses from websites with outdated direct links (for example images)

This way it’s possible to know about dead links and the visitor is getting some good looking and clear error page while he is following an outdated link.

The whole script can be downloaded from the tutorial section at Webdigity