Broken links are nothing but links within your website that leads to pages that do not exist, hence the reader lands up on a 404 error. This error can occur due to two reasons: the page may have been deleted or you may have used the wrong URL while creating the link.
This results in annoying the visitors on your website, because it hugely affects the user experience which leads them to leave your website. There is one more repercussion to broken links on your website: broken links don't go very well with the search engines and too many of them affects your search rankings. It will drastically affect your website's visibility in search engines.
Manually finding these broken links can be a huge-pain-in-the a**! But it's also essential to check and rectify such links in every 6-8 months. Therefore I would like to share two very handy tools for finding such links:
Online Broken Link Checker:
This is an online service that scans all the pages on your website and also validates both external and internal links. A free service that locates the location of faulty HTML codes. Online Broken Link Checker is compatible with OS X, Windows, iPad, LINUX and UNIX. You can run this service on any browser: IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari.
"Our server spider is capable of crawling any website no matter if it's coded by hand - with pure HTML/XHTML, or is based on PHP, ASP, JSP, Cold fusion etc or is built using Joomla, WordPress or any other CMS. All this makes it a true cross-platform SEO tool always ready to use." shares the website. (Link)
Xenu's Link Sleuth
Unlike the previous tool, Xenu is a free software that runs a verification on all the pages on your website. You will first need to download this software after-which checking broken links will be a piece of cake. When you first visit the website, the design of the website will definitely put you off..but trust us, it is a completely legitimate site that works beautifully.
"To have a peace of mind, I recommend that you use an up-to-date anti-virus software for your computer." recommends the developer.
Please note that this software is compatible with Windows only.
Once you complete the scan through Xenu that verifies regular links, images, frames, plug-ins etc. it will produce a detailed report where you can easily find all the broken links on your website. (Link)
Give them a try and let us know if you found them to be useful. And if you know some more similar tools or services, then do share them with us.
You may like to check out:
This is not a free service but you can check out http://siteimprove.com/Solutions/SiteCheck/SiteCheck2.aspx for larger websites.
Thanks for sharing this with us Steve.