Key to Link Valet Reports

Link Valet is a WWW Link checker. It uses an HTML table to present the links in a page, and a CSS Stylesheet to highlight information that is likely to be of interest to you.

The table of links comprises three columns:

Left - the link's URL. These may be presented as HTML links, as discussed under link styles below.
Middle - the HTTP Status code of the URL. This may be highlighted to indicate a recent update or an error condition, as discussed in code styles below.
Right - Summary information concerning the link returned by the server.

Unchecked Links

Link Valet may not attempt to check every link:

Link Valet follows the Robots Exclusion Protocol, and will not follow any link forbidden to the User Agent Link Valet Online (including of course links forbidden to all robots).
Link Valet will list HTML Forms in a page, but will not submit them. When one or more Form is encountered in a page, Link Valet offers you a button to load the page into cg-eye live and obtain extensive diagnostics on the Form.
Link Valet limits the size of report it will generate, by limiting the depth of recursion of the spider. When you reach the limit, it will refuse to probe further.

When Link Valet refuses to check a link, it will always tell you why.

Key to Link Information

The following illustrate the meanings of highlighting controlled by the stylesheet. You will need a stylesheet-enabled browser to take advantage of this information.

Link Styles

Link types are as follows:

Internal Links

Internal Links are other HTML documents at the site. Clicking an internal link will take you to the Link Valet report for that page.

External Links

External Links take you directly to the URL listed.

Non-Links

When a link should not be followed, either because it is in fact the Action of an HTML Form or because it is not a valid link, Link Valet will not generate any link at all.

Unchecked Links

Unchecked links are greyed as shown:

A link that is forbidden by Robot Rules.

A link that is a Form Action.

A link that has not been checked.

Code Styles

The numbers shown here are examples in each category. See HTTP Status Codes for further information.

500	An Error. The server could not be contacted, or refused to return a document at the URL given.
301	Document has moved and the server has redirected us. Link Valet will tell you where.
200	The document was found, but has changed since you last checked.
200	The document was found, and has not changed recently.
200	The server didn't tell us when the document last changed.
200	The server may return different documents from the same URL (e.g. different language versions). Link Valet will show further information.

Note that both new and old documents may have multiple versions.