Update

We have started noticing broken hyperlinks on product literature in catalogues from those suppliers that were adding hyperlinks to pages on their external website rather than uploading files to EBOSS.

The broken hyperlinks would occur when the supplier made infrastructural changes to their own website — such as deleting the page in question, moving it to a different URL or completely overhauling the website with a new development agency that used new URLs (without setting up redirections).

We recommend hosting your files on EBOSS to avoid this happening (and setting up page redirects anytime you make URL changes to your website), however to help suppliers quickly see which links are broken, we have utilised a fancy script that checks all 25,000+ product literature items for bad links. (It runs constantly but in order to not slow down the site, it only checks 30 links every 15 minutes, taking a week to run through all items on the site.)

In the supplier admin when looking at your products you will see it shows the number of broken links on a product and a “good” or “bad” status next to literature items that are links to external websites. This allows you to find the correct URL and fix it.

Further detail

Links are checked weekly for their validity. It will also check it upon saving. If the page goes to a 404 page not found error, the link will be marked as “bad”, giving suppliers the opportunity to fix the URL. If the link is now redirected to another page, our system will update the link with the new URL.

Affected pages

• Product page
• Supplier admin