Trouble validating URLs from a specific server.

First of all: I'm really impressed so far with both the site and the supportive community.  Wizzley really does seem to have hit the ground running.

My issue:

I've got a few articles waiting in the wings, but every time I try to include a link, the URL validator returns with "the following URLs do not appear to be valid".

After experimenting further, I realised this error only comes up for websites on a specific server - so it may well be an issue on their end.  That said, I've been able to link to these websites just fine from Wizzley until now.  It's only an issue that's cropped up in the last week or so.

Conversely, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping other crawling/validation processes elsewhere from recognising these sites.

For reference, these are some of the websites in question:

• http://www.cpsqld.com.au/
• http://www.arozonservices.com.au/
• http://anywherehairandmakeup.com.au/

Anyone have any theories on what the problem might be?  Any ideas would be hugely appreciated.  Thanks!

Yes, I tried that too. I added

<p><a href="http://anywherehairandmakeup.com.au/" target="_blank">test</a></p>

in the html editor in a text module on one of my pages, and it told me the link doesn't appear to be valid.

No idea what's happening but you're right, it is happening :).

Sorry about that. Some links are indeed problematic with our link validator and we couldn't find a fully working solution so far. Only a few servers are affected, so over all, it's still better to have the validator activated. Adding target or rel attributes doesn't make a difference.

One of your URLs - http://www.arozonservices.com.au/ - is indeed a 404, though ;-)

I was going to say that it might be to do with having httpS in the URL, but none of your URLs have this, so I'm going to keep my mouth shut on this one.

LOL but you said it anyway haha, I enjoy your articulated posts Chaz, you bring the cool to intelligence :)

humagaia: 11/21/2012 - 04:23 AM

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I was going to say that it might be to do with having httpS in the URL, but none of your URLs have this, so I'm going to keep my mouth shut on this one.

Mira: Thanks a bunch for going to the effort of checking. Always nice reassurance to know it's not just a local problem.

Simon: Fair enough!  If there's no way around it, I can happily just sit on the articles for a while.

Or am I better off posting them sans links for now?  It would be nice to attain that coveted dofollow status for my existing 3-4 pieces, but would it raise editor suspicions if I edited them later solely to work in backlinks?

(And well spotted on the 404.  It wasn't one I used - just a moment of poor memory on my part!)

So long as your backlinks are relevant and useful to readers, you may add them anytime you want, Alice.

'Dofollow' comes after 5 approved articles.  

It looks like the issue (at least for this particular server) has been resolved.  

Thanks again for the friendly help!

For the record, this issue seems to have started up again.  It seems I can only sneak those links in during lucky pockets of time!

I'm not sure if there's anything to be gained from pointing this out (no doubt it's in capable hands), but just to be on the safe side...  

It's a timeout issue then. The link validator has a timer on it so if a page takes longer than XX:XX time then the link is just considered invalid (instead of telling you simply the page timed out). If you persevere though often once all the pages high resolution images or whatever is slowing it down (too many images making up the page?) then your cache will remember the load objects and load them locally- this shaves a lot of time off downloading them again every time but since they do load locally (providing your cache is near empty) the page itself will load faster just copying over text likely- this is when the validator works better because the page loaded as it anticipated it to. 

The other scenario is the page loading in the validator at "sweet spot" time frames is likely due to internet latency or lack there of- when THOSE servers aren't being pounded so much with consistent traffic.

I've resolved 99% of these issues simply by knowing this IS the issue (for me anyway) and I either wait longer, load several times on purpose to get the cached page so it will load, or, and this was a later realization- just loading the page completely before trying to save the module (thus turning on the validator). When you load the page fully, leaving it open in another tab- it's incredibly fast to load for the validator (I assume) and it seems to go every time.

Hope this helps... 

Jerrico

VisionTips: 01/13/2013 - 08:02 PM

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For the record, this issue seems to have started up again.  It seems I can only sneak those links in during lucky pockets of time!

I'm not sure if there's anything to be gained from pointing this out (no doubt it's in capable hands), but just to be on the safe side...  

Thanks, Jerrico.  Unfortunately - as this applies to every site on one server - it's looking likely this is one of the "few servers" Simon mentioned.  C'est la vie!  I'll just keep trying from time to time and hope to get lucky.