THE URLTO PLAYBOOK / 10 GUIDES
Link inventory10-part series
Review internal, external, empty, duplicate and special links.
Know the feature scope
Extract and classify fetched HTML links without visiting every destination for 404 checks. Script-generated links can be missing.
Series contents
10 guides- 01
Review internal and external links before publishing
Review internal, external, duplicate and empty links extracted from a page. Distinguish a link inventory from destination availability checks and choose a useful next investigation.
- 02
Review important page connections with the internal-link list
Internal links help readers find the next page. Check useful connections rather than counts alone.
- 03
Review the purpose and destinations of external references
External links provide evidence or service navigation. Review their purpose and final destination together.
- 04
Compare empty href and # links with actual behavior
An empty link may be missing a URL or relying on a script. Identify the intended action first.
- 05
Verify targets of in-document links
A #section link can point to a reading position in the same document. Compare the label with the actual target.
- 06
Read duplicate-link counts in navigation and content context
Repeated links can be useful. Do not treat duplicate counts as an automatic deletion list.
- 07
Distinguish mailto and tel links from web navigation
Contact links may launch mail or phone functions instead of web pages. They need a different verification path.
- 08
Check the base used to resolve relative paths
about and /about can resolve differently. Review resulting destinations when the page moves.
- 09
Build a manual click checklist from the link inventory
Follow the inventory with direct tests of important actions. Prioritize registration, purchase and contact paths.
- 10
When a website check fails: interpret the error in context
Distinguish target restrictions, connection failures and unexpected HTML in website, SEO, link and response checks. Understand why a server fetch can differ from your browser.