Finding a Webpage with an Obsolete URL

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, Issue 61, October 1, 1999

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Too often, when you're searching for a URL you get a frustrating "404 Error," page not found. If this is a link to valuable information, for example, an article we link to in Web Marketing Today, you may need it now! Unfortunately this a pretty common problem, since URLs are constantly changing as webmasters "reorganize" their site, and as older information is revised or removed from a site.

It won't help you find the article faster to send an e-mail to the owner of the page with the now-obsolete link. What happens on other sites is beyond their control. (We check and update our links every few months, but it might be kind to send a note to the page owner informing them of the bad link.)

Rather, I suggest this strategy:

1. Searching. Go to the main domain indicated by the URL and try searching for a keyword in their site search feature (if they have one). If that doesn't work ...
2. Snipping. If the obsolete URL were something like the fictional example below:
   
   http://www.domainname.com/level1/level2/level3/page.htm
   
   try cutting off the "page.htm" so you have
   
   http://www.domainname.com/level1/level2/level3/
   
   and see what happens. Sometimes it will show you a directory of what's there and you can find the article. If that doesn't work (or it says you don't have permission to look there), just keep cutting backward until you get to something that tells you what's there, such as:
   
   http://www.domainname.com/level1/level2/
   http://www.domainname.com/level1/
3. (3) When all else fails, send an e-mail to the webmaster at the site that the bad URL points to, asking for the new URL of the article. You can usually contact someone if you send an e-mail to webmaster@ or support@.

We'll always have this problem of shifting and disappearing URLs, but the detective method outlined here usually does the trick.

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Read additional articles from Web Marketing Today, Issue 61, October 1, 1999