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There are no broken links on your web page? Sure? If your web project is bigger than a couple of pages you will need the help of an automatic link checker tool to answer this question. If you do not check the links regularly and there are too many broken links you risk that:

• the usability will be bad, because users just waste their time with clicking on the broken links
• the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) suffers, because the search engine crawlers might waste their (limited!) time with following these links.

Xenu´s Link Sleuth by Tilman Hausherr

In a previous post I have already presented the Linkchecker Firefox plugin, which helps you too analyze links, but it can only check the links of the current page. Don´t worry you will not have to go to each page to check all links one-by-one if you use the following free tool: (Thx to my Twitter-Friend David Douek, for recommending it!)

Xenu´s Link Sleuth - Download

• How does it work?

  Pretty easy! You type the URL of the page that you want to check, push the button and watch how the tool follows the links of your page. It actually works similar like a search engine crawler.

• Cool Features

  The broken link report is very easy to understand and convenient to use, because it will open a simple HTML file where you can directly click the reported links in your browser. Also nice: you can choose if you also want a sitemap or additional statistics. Tip: press CTRL + r to retry all links that failed because of connection problems and you can avoid that this will influence your report. Last not least: It is really fast and even if you are afraid that your server could go down you can limit the crawling speed.

• What could still be improved?

  In my opinion it would be nice to limit the maximum number of links or time the linkchecker runs. Especially for websites with generated content it is not always necessary to check all the links.

Do you have experience with this tool, or can you recommend other free linkchecker tools? Please let me know and leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. Google Visitors Special: Interesting Queries And Answers
2. Project Management with the opensource tool GanttProject
3. How SEO Will Affect Your Product Planning Right From The Beginning
4. 11 Very Useful Firefox Plugins For Web Product Managers And Web Designers
5. The Most Popular Quality Assurance Testing Mistakes

Tags: download, reviews, SEO, tools, web product manager

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.