Links to GPWA member portal sites now use https when appropriate

[MichaelCorfman]

Today in the GPWA member directory there are 7,524 portal sites associated with 3,772 members.

Historically our member pages have linked to associated portal sites using http. More recently we have had the ability to note that a site supports https, and thus upon the request of members we have linked to their portal sites using https.

This past weekend we crawled the home page of member portal sites to determine which sites support https and so today we have updated many member portal site links to use https. In total we determined that links to 5,692 portal sites (75.6% of the 7,542 portal sites) could safely be changed to use https.

We also updated portal site host names to add and remove www prefixes based on observing redirects. There are now 4,474 member portal sites (59.5%) that have a prefix of www and 3.050 sites that do not (40.5%). We added a www prefix to 69 member portal sites and removed a www prefix from 209 member portal sites as part of the update.

I invite all GPWA members to update their list of associated websites. You can review your list of websites either on your member page or by visiting the “My Portal Sites” page under “My Account” in the top navigation when logged into the GPWA website. If you have a new website that should be added or other updates that should be made, follow the instructions on the “My Portal Sites” page to let us know.

I encourage everyone to add missing sites to gain the SEO benefit of the links.

Michael

[PROFRBcom]

How many dead/404 websites were removed from the listings?
Or parked domains?


APCW could use a huge purge also (I mentioned this a couple years ago).

[MichaelCorfman]

How many dead/404 websites were removed from the listings?
Or parked domains?

We will be undertaking a variety of additional cleanup tasks, but that work remains to be completed. For example, I know that 218 of the sites (2.9%) fail due to DNS lookup errors. Those will all be removed (except instances that are properly addressed by adding or removing a www prefix from the host name). And we can identify a number of sites that are parked - some because they redirect to a parking page, some because of the contents of the page title.

On the APCW front, I believe we have reviewed and updated the list of APCW partner sites fairly recently, but I will perform a new crawl of that page and make sure any necessary cleanup work is completed.

Michael

[MichaelCorfman]

At the time I made this announcement we had begun using https links for portal sites on member pages and in the portal site directory. There were a couple areas left to be addressed, and those areas are now also using https for links to portal sites when appropriate.

First, the monthly posts I make in the GPWA forum to announce most active members each month now use https links to member's portal sites. So, that is true of the announcement I made today here: Recognition for June's Active Members.

Second, links to active member portals on the home page and other pages of the GPWA websites also now use https when appropriate.

I believe that takes care of all links to member sites (other than links within old posts).

Michael