Best Free Web Site Link Checker
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In a Hurry?
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Introduction
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Virtually all websites have dead or broken links in the same way that all software has bugs. Mistakes happen, content changes, file names and locations change, and external links change. And until you've checked links for some period of time, and learned what breaks them, you're likely to repeat the classic mistakes on a regular basis. ;-) Link checkers work much like a search engine spider. They "crawl" your website looking for internal and external links that are broken. Crawling is recursive, meaning that the spider builds a tree of links leading from page to page until all branches have been explored. Spidering continues until it reaches a defined termination point. For example, when all internal branches have been examined, or when all first level external links have also been examined. A good link checker also produces broken-link reports that enable you to determine where the broken link is located, and why the link is broken. |
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Discussion
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Xenu's Link Sleuth is the only free link checker that I know of that does the whole job. I've used it for many years. It's simple, small, fast and accurate. It takes a while to learn how to use Xenu's Link Sleuth, and it can be daunting to understand the reports, but if you stick with it you'll come to appreciate the excellent job it does. REL Link Checker Lite can do the basic task, but is limited to 1000 links, so you need to work in one sub-directory (if you have them) at a time for larger sites. It's hard to learn how to use RLCL, but it's easy to use once you figure it out. :-) HINT: Use REL's "Help". It is concise and useful. You'll probably be baffled without it. The Link Evaluator extension for Firefox works well, but it only checks one page at a time. However it's useful when you want to do a quick check. |
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Related Products and Links
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Web-based Alternatives: Google Webmaster Tools reports the errors that the Google spider finds when it crawls your website. You'll find the link errors (not found) under "Web crawl errors" in the "Overview" section of the "Dashboard". The beauty of the link error report is that the details page shows the page(s) that contain the broken link(s). The FreeFind search engine crawls your website to power their free site search. When finished FreeFind provides a very complete spider report, which shows all the broken links. The page that contains a broken link is not listed though, so it often takes some sleuthing to figure out where broken links are located. |
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There is a link checker that also does spell checking and some basic SEO checks (page title, meta tags) etc at http://www.distinctquality.com. Its free. Only does one page at a time, but the built in spell checker support is nice.
Thanks so much for the depth and understanding at which you covered the topic. it's a useful piece of information not only for me but for many others. have read a lot on the topic at different blogs and books but this piece really is most helpful
Well, ok Xenu does the job well, but, I really love the functionality and the way of checking from inside Firefox, using de Freita's LinkChecker add-on. I have a rather extensive site with a few thousand links and I love to check it page by page in Firefox, using this add-on. Works perfect and fast.
Willem Rabbeljee
Here's another online link checker. I used it to make sure all the links to articles I refer to on my blog are still working. It doesn't give page numbers or anything, but does show the link that's not working so it wasn't too hard to find.
http://www.2bone.com/links/linkchecker.shtml
That's a nice simple way to check links on single pages that are online.
Cheers
I agree. I tried both the online check at 2bone and the Firefox Link Evaluator add-on, and 2bone was far superior.
I'm quite disappointed with Link Evaluator. The first dozen links I checked came up green, but almost everything else came up orange, "timed out". Most of them are perfectly good links, so I might as well have checked them all manually myself to begin with.
2bone gave me an easy list to look at, most of the links were alive and well, and I could go and fix the broken links. Thanx for this! So helpful.
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