This is a little survey to find out what MSU webmasters do to manage link rot. If you wish, please send me a private response and I'll summarize answers later. -- Do you have policies in place to try to minimize how often popular URLs change? -- How many major reorganizations of your site have you done? -- Have you changed the host name of your Web server, rendering the initial part of all URLs different? Did you keep a small forwarding Web server at the old address? -- Do you use aliases for your server with and without the "www" prefix? (e.g. www.etruscan.msu.edu and etruscan.msu.edu)? -- When you do a major site reorganization, do you try to schedule it for slower traffic periods, e.g. during the summer? -- What steps do you take to inform your site visitors of impending or recent changes? -- Do you use redirectors so that popular entry points that change will continue to lead users to the right spot? -- If your site offers frequently updated content, e.g. a weekly newsletter, does each new edition appear at a single URL (such as www.etruscan.msu.edu/newsletter) or does each edition get its own unique address? -- Does your site include a number of links to external pages whose content and location are beyond your control? -- How do you do link checking? (A server-side tool; an external link checking service such as the W3C tool; a desktop tool such as a commercial product for a Windows desktop?) -- Do you combine link checking with service monitoring? -- Do you have any sort of Error 404 handler to intercept attempts to load non-existent pages, offering the user some helpful hints? FYI, we offer ready-to-roll code for Apache/Unix and for IIS/NT|2000 servers. See: http://search.msu.edu/help/providers/errorhandler/ Thanks! /rich