URL Dead Zones

A friend of mine wrote me the other day to complain about a website that talked up the music of the mid-1950's but offered no contact information. My friend shops the web for sheet music and lyrics and he simply couldn't understand why someone would post lyrics without allowing him to write or make a purchase. There had to be some sort of purpose to the page. He wrote to me in frustration.

I visited the site and found that the page had no hyperlinks. Not back to a main page. Not to anywhere. In that sort of case, you need to look at the URL itself to see if you can follow the trail back from a subdirectory to find the root, in other words you want to find some sort of main page.

In this case the URL was: http://www.mtbrook55.com/1955hits.htm

The page my friend and I have been looking at is called 1955hits.htm. The main page is what is left: www.mtbrook55.com. In most cases, the best way to find the identity of the web host, or at least some kind of raison d'etre for the web site, is to visit that main page. Often non-professionals will create pages that don't link back and forth, only one way. A good case for saying, "You can't get there from here!"

Well, actually you can get to the main page. Simply click into the URL window at the end of the URL and backspace through the characters until the subdirectory characters have been removed and all that are left are the characters for the main page URL. There are lots of links there. The whole thing has to do with a class reunion.

The music page turned out to be a dead zone for my friend, who Googled his way onto the page. His visit was out of context. But for class reunion enthusiasts who entered from the main page, the music page was a logical part of a package. (Although the prospective class reunionists might get lost if they don't know how to use the back arrow to to return to the main page.)

In another case, you might land on a cemetery page while doing genealogy research. You can go back one level and visit the main page for the county where that and other cemeteries are found. We're not permitted to visit the next couple of tiers up the subdirectory chain. You have to go all the way back to the root of the website to get another foothold.

Don't expect to easily find your way from the root page back to where you were originally simply by using links found on the root page. Maybe it will be easy, but then again it may be nearly impossible. On this particular page, you can use the search feature to try perusing the US state in question, but it could take you a few hours to get anywhere that way. The special topics search feature is more useful. It lets you check off "cemeteries" and conduct a search for the county and state in question. The best choice in my search results happened to be the list of county cemeteries I was looking for. Whew!

In some cases a website will have orphaned pages that are parked in the domain but aren't linked to anything. Those pages have to be Googled, unless you can find a file directory within the website. I haven't had much luck finding file lists for this article -- maybe they are old technology? I imagine they are out there still, somewhere. If you have a good example, post it as a reply.