Broken links will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page.Broken links are results of operations like file deletion,folder removal,folder rename or moving the site itself to a different domain. The web users will easily get annoyed because of the “404 Not Found” error page.To find out the broken links on your website you can use any of the following options.Few of these services like the Link Checker from w3c is a service available online and others like Xenu can use after installing on your computer.
1. The Link Checker
This is a tool from w3c to check links and anchors in Web pages or full Web sites.There are many options which you can set before starting the link check.You can check linked documents recursively and also you can set recursion depth.This Link Checker reports issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page.You can do this recursively on a whole Web site.
2. Google webmaster tool -Crawl Errors
The Crawl errors page provides details about the URLs in your site that we tried to crawl but could not access.
To view crawl errors:
1. Login to Google webmaster tool
1. On the Webmaster Tools Home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Diagnostics, click Crawl errors.
This will list any URLs gogle had difficulty crawling,and will list the type of problem and thelist the page or pages on which crawler encountered error.
3.Broken Link Checker -wordpress plug-in
This plug-in will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.The broken links, if any are found, will show up in a new tab of WP admin panel – Tools -> Broken Links. Once installed after parsing the plug-in will start checking each link to see if it works.
You can download the Broken Link Checker plug-in from here.
4. Xenu’s 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.
This tool is available to download here.
5. LinkChecker
LinkChecker is a free, GPL licensed URL validator.It does recursive and multi-threaded checking.It has cokies support and honors robots.txt exclusion protocol.
The tool has a command line interface as well as a GUI client interface
You can download the tool here.
You can also try the following
KLinkStatus
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