Link-Checker Reports
What is the Link Checker Report?
Purpose
The purpose of the Link Checker Report is to inform site managers of pages that are either stale, contains broken links, or have ADA-related issue so that they can be easily found and corrected. This improves the overall experience for site visitors by ensuring that they don't run into issues browsing TXST websites.
Who receives them?
The Link Checker Report will be sent to all listed managers of each site. To view the current list of managers or to update the manager list, please navigate to the Gato Management area. Managers cannot be made exempt from receiving these reports without giving up all managerial privileges. Additional non-manager recipients can also be requested by contacting ITAC support.
Frequency
Reports will be sent to site managers and other requested recipients nightly until errors are corrected. The frequency of reports cannot be altered. Accessibility errors included in the report will update weekly.
Error Reports
Types of Reports
- Broken links
- Stale Pages
- Accessibility
Broken Links
A list of common errors related to broken links can be found further down the page. If you have any questions regarding errors found in your report, please feel free to contact us for support.
Stale Pages
A list of stale pages can be found in a separate tab within the report. These can be resolved by updating the page as needed, followed by publishing once you've ensured that it's current. To adjust how frequently you're notified about stale pages, you can adjust this setting in the page properties.
Accessibility
For guidance on reported accessibility issues, please visit the WAVE Guide on the Digital Accessibility website. For additional questions questions regarding web accessibility, please contact EIRAccessCoord@txstate.edu.
Site managers will receive a nightly email containing a link to the error report for the site that they manage. Upon opening the link, managers will be able to view all link-related errors. If no errors are present, the report will appear blank, like in the photo to the right.
Interpreting Errors
Each error listed on the link-checker report contains the following information:
Page Containing the Error
This page can be navigated to by clicking the box and arrow icon located to the right of the link.
Link Text
This is the text of the broken link. Linked images will appear as having no link text.
Link URL (as it appears on your page)
This is the broken URL.
Link URL (as your browser interprets it)
This is how your browser interprets the broken URL. This is typically the same as the above URL.
Error
This is the type of error that has been found. Please see the below section for more information on error types.
Common Errors
404 Not Found
This is the most common type of error. This error is typically caused by broken links. To resolve this issue, make sure that the reported link is pointing to a proper location. If it is not, the link needs to be corrected or removed.
Link Text: This link has no text.
If no link text appears, this likely means that the broken link is linked to an image. This includes the icon and text content type. If you are unable to easily find the image containing a broken link, you can inspect the HTML of the page in your browser and search for the Link URL provided in the error report.
If the broken link is not contained inside an image, there is a possibility that the link exists in a blank space between words.
500 Internal Server Error
These errors serve as a catch-all error when server related issue are detected. In Gato, these tend to be temporary issues, but have often occurred when images on pages are too large. The size of the image causes the image to load slowly, which triggers the error. To correct this, try resizing and re-uploading the image in a smaller size.
Hostname not found
This error is caused by incorrect URL syntax. All URLs should be written as https://www.txstate.edu.
On occasion, users have seen the beginning of the URL in the Link Checker report begin with "http://https://", which is incorrect. These specific issues have to be corrected by Gato support.