How to Find Broken Links

Broken links annoy the visitors to your web site, which lowers you percentage of return visitors.

In addition, broken links on your web site may negatively affect your search engine rankings.

Finding broken links on your web site can be accomplished by either a downloadable program such as Xenu Link Sleuth, or by using a web-based application such as the W3C Link Checker.

Xenu Link Sleuth

Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file less than 500K
• Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

W3C Link Checker

With the W3C Link Checker, you simply enter the address (URL) of a document that you would like to check into their online form.