The presence of broken links can cause irreparable damages if allowed to remain. In fact correction of the same facilitates an increase in both the revenue and web traffic. But checking for these broken links manually can be a very exhaustive and time-consuming process and the use of an online broken link scanner makes good business sense as it helps find all broken links from and to the concerned website by literally crawling through all the WebPages present in the website.
Some of the top-ranking but free broken link scanner which is being popularly used today is:
- Online broken checker
Common features include:
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- About 3000 WebPages each containing an unlimited number of hyperlinks can be scanned,
- Both external and internal links can be scanned,
- Even broken links in HTML are reported,
- Is complaint with all types of operating systems like Windows, Linux, Mac OS, iOS, etc.
- Deadline checker
It checks the website very thoroughly for broken links and provides users with 2 options:
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- Multi-check option for scanning multiple websites in one go and
- Auto-check option to keep scanning a website and generating reports at regular intervals.
- Xenu-link sleuth
This handy application is a favorite of many web monitoring companies like Hexometer because of its ability to:
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- Make a thorough check of the root webpage,
- Customize filters as per the need of the user and
- Presence of many active configurations to look for broken links.
- W3C Link Validation
This helps to find all broken links associated with anchors, CSS, WebPages, links and the website as a whole. The quality of the output is unparallel and hence this is a very handy tool for most.
- Google webmaster
This tool comes with the Google guarantee and thus goes beyond the realm of broken link checking to come up with errors related to indexing, crawling and sitemaps.
While these tools have gained immense popularity because of the uniqueness of their features and characteristics, it depends on the user to find one which is most appropriate for him. This needs to be done as soon as possible to prevent web visitors from becoming irritated with their websites and leaving them forever.
