NAME
WWW::Link::Redirect - redirect analysis
DESCRIPTION
Redirects are used for lots of reasons. Most of them bad. When doing link checking, we want to ignore those redirects which are done for bad reasons and only focus on those which are really telling us that something has been reorganised.
The standards tell us that we can look at the difference between a permanent redirect and a temporary one. Unfortunately nobody reads standards.
We use some heuristics to help us make our own assesment.
FUNCTION
implementation redirect
sometimes an artefact of software implementation means that a web page may be referenced on one page but read on another. This is a very bad thing from their point of view, but means that we don't want to change anything on our pages.
Example
http://example.com/
http://example.com/our_web_designers/start-here.active_summit_page
or
http://example.com/
http://web4.example.com/first.html.txt.zip.active.exe
our heuristic is that if the end of the authority is maintained and the start of the path is maintained then we consider this mistake simply a design mistake.