[Up-Date] I have since come across a Wordpress plugin called Broken Link checker that does this job a lot quicker! It’s excellent.
I recently come across a cool application that crawls and detects broken outbound links, and the best part is that it’s fee! Over time every web site will face the same problem, links won’t work as they once did, which ultimately gives a poor user experience if a visitor ever clicked on the link and nothing happened. Broken links can also impact your SEO efforts as the search engine spiders will also crawl those links if the page is indexed and find nothing, indicating your site isn’t well kept.
You can easily fix this with a new tool I’ve come across called Senu’s Link Sleuth.
Here is a screen shot of the software in action:
Yes, it looks very basic but it certainly does the job of crawling every URL on your domain, finding the links and then checking the page/file you link to see if it’s broken, very well. For example, it checked 2011 URL’s on this blog and reported a 370 broken links links that need checking. I’ve fount that you’ll need to double check the links as some are okay when opening them up in a browser, apparently this is due to the sites server configuration.
You can export the data in tab format (.txt) (ctrl+T), then once saved locally open the document using Microsoft Excel to easily manage fixing the links – This will certainly help me as I can now import this into Google Docs and work through the list when I have spare time (and then will have to run the program again on hundreds of other sites :( )
I’m often asked what SEO tools I use, and I’ve always not used that many – I think a lot of the tools out their give you stats but don’t actually do anything to help your SEO efforts. Apart from using some search commands in Google, Yahoo Site Explorer and Keyword Tracker, this is another I’ll be using.
Cool tool; I’m going to check it out right now :)
Cool! Thanks. I’ll check it out.