Free SEO Tools: Broken Links Finder

Broken links can be dangerous to your website's health. This could annoy your visitors when they click for a link then reach a 404 page that says the page they are looking for is not found in this site. In the first place, they are not literally looking for that friggin' page. It was you (the webmaster) who set that up then brought them to that 404 page.

Worst, if the webmaster did not setup a 404 page, it is more annoying for the visitor to see the default browser 404 page. That experience to the visitor is very frustrating and may vow not to come back to your unprofessional website anymore. Not fixing those broken links can hurt your reputation as a webmaster from your visitors.



But aside from being tagged as unprofessional, this can also hurt your website in search engine rankings. When the spiders crawl your website, they are going to follow all links that they can see in each of the pages in your site. When they encounter a broken link, they stop there and would not complete in mapping the entire website, thus submitting an incomplete count of indexable pages of your site to their index. This entire process can then contribute to the poor showing of your site's ranking in search engines.

With the above reasons, it's best to include finding and fixing broken links in every webmasters' housekeeping to-do list. But how about if you have thousands of pages to maintain? Or how about if you are a newcomer and you are not familiar with the whole structure of the website you are supposed to maintain?

In one of my SEO projects, I came accross a website with thousands of pages. In my broken links analysis phase, I found it to be very tiresome and frustrating. Imagine thousands of pages to check? It would really be a pain in the ass to do such a task.

But thankfully I came accross with this free tool that can find broken links automatically (did I say FREE?). What I like best for this program is it crawls your website to its depeest structure and has no limit on the number of pages it is going to search. It will report the broken links' url and the url's linking to them. There are other free programs like this but they put alimit on the number of pages they can crawl.



Another thing I like about this program is that it is not only for broken links but you can also use this to find duplicate titles in your website. Just arrange the pages alphabetically using the titles column and you can immediately notice pages with duplicate titles! How about that? You can hit two birds with one stone!

That's why this tool is a must for every person doing SEO, and what is best with this software? It is fully funtional even if it is free! And I would say it again - its totally FREE! So for those free-stuff-lovers like me, why won't you grab a piece of this valuable tool and sweep your website with those annoying broken links. You can find detailed description and download it in its official website at http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.

By the way, the name of the program is Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) and is written by this great person named  Tilman Hausherr.

4 comments:

Trisha said...

Thank you for sharing this tool. I never thought there's a free tool for this one. nice find!

Krista Ranillo said...

what I like with this tool is the unlimited feature for the number of urls it returns, unlike some other free tools that only limits the number of urls they return.

Cheap Satellite TV said...

this is a great tool, thank you for sharing.

Henri Alaja said...

You're right it is really annoying if you see the page is 404.This tool is awesome thanks for spreading it to everybody.

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