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Searching the Internet

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General Information

Quality Checklist | Dead URLs | About Search Engines | What's New | Tutorials and Tools

Dealing With Dead URLs

404 Not Found
Page does not exist anymore. You can try going up one level in the hierarchy (delete the last part of the URL to the nearest slash; sometimes you have to add ".html" at the end again), go to the home page or site map. Sometimes a page has simply been renamed and you can find a link to it under another name on the higher level page. In Google, you can avoid this problem with the cache function, which allows you to see the page at the time it was indexed. Try doing a search by the title of the dead web page (if you have it) in Google to find its new URL.
Unable to Locate Server
The server does not exist (the link is outdated). Follow steps for 404 error.
Unable to locate host
The server may be down or you may have connection problems. Try reloading the page and check the URL.
Failed DNS lookup
The URL cannot be translated to a valid (numerical) Internet address. First, try reloading the page. If that does not work, check the URL for spelling errors. (DNS = Domain Name System is a database system for translating domain names into numeric Internet addresses.)
File contains no data
There are no documents on this site. This often happens when the page is being updated. Try the URL again later.
Host is unavailable
The host server is down. Try reloading the page later.
Source listing how to deal with dead URLs:
Mabercom's Internet Search Tutorial for Translators (http://www.mabercom.com/websearch/index.html) (accessed 2/28/02)


Last modified: June 24, 2005

   
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