Free link checker

A free link checker is an essential tool if you intend to run a 'tight ship' on your website.

Have you ever gone to a website, tried to click on a link, only to find that it doesn't work?

It's extremely frustrating for web users and reflects badly on a website.

This scenario is created by what's called a 'broken link' and it's something that you should aim to avoid.

Sometimes though, it's not the fault of a webmaster that a link doesn't work.

You can link to a website that worked perfectly well at the time you created a page, but over the course of time, the website may go offline and there's nothing you can do about it as a third party.

Why you should get a free link checker

As well as being crucial to a great user experience on your website, there's another important technical reason for not having broken links on your website.

It's likely that over time the search engines will penalize you for having links that lead nowhere.

By 'penalize' I don't mean that any direct punishment will be applied, the search engines will just work out as a result of crawling your site that you send them (and your user) on lots of wild goose chases to websites that don't exist, and they will rank you accordingly in the engines.

So as you create your content-packed website which is full of external web links to third party sites, how do you check them all to make sure that they still work?

Using a free link checker

You'll notice here that I'm using the term 'free link checker'.

That's because you can pay for this service if you want to and, in the case of the web hosting service that I use, it's sometimes even part of an integrated service.

I get an automated email every so often telling me if I have broken links ... and I always put the errors right straight away.

An established and well regarded service for broken links testing is linkalarm.com, but with more and more people giving things away for free on the web, I really don't recommend that you pay if this checking facility is not part of your basic web hosting package.

A free link checker that I've found - and like - is available via dead-links.com.

You simply add your website URL and the website will tell you which links - if any - are broken.

Another amazing free tool is Xenu's Link Sleuth which has the most difficult to remember URL ever http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.

However, it's a tremendous bit of software which you have to download and install, but it gives you a comprehensive listing of every weblink and marks those which are broken in red.

There are a number of other tools available via a Google search, and a process of trial and error will help you to establish which one you like working with best.

They key points that you need to take away from this article are:

1) You must build regular checks for broken links into your website maintenance and checking regime.

2) You don't need to pay somebody to do this for you.

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