Find broken links with Xenu Link

Find broken links with Xenu Link, a cool and free program that checks all links on a site for correctness. Help fix broken links.

Finding broken links on a website is a complicated task if you do not have software that allows you to automate the process. Xenu Link will help you to do this in a fast and personalized way. The only problem is that it is an application only compatible for Windows.

One of the details that we should not overlook in order to have a well-finished web page is that all its links are correct. Surely we have experienced more than once the sad experience of clicking on a link and getting a page not found error or something similar. This is never satisfactory and gives a very bad image of the company or organization responsible for the page. Likewise, broken links usually count negatively in the positioning of our website.

It can be very difficult, or at least very laborious, to test absolutely all the links on a site, especially if it is a large website, with hundreds or thousands of links. In addition, not only do you have to verify that all the links are correct and there are no broken links, you also have to make sure that all the images, style sheets, Flash movies, etc. are well located.

To help us in the task of verifying all the references of a site, there are programs that go through the arborescence of the web and automatically check all the links, images, backgrounds… that they find. One of these programs is the one that concerns us. It’s called Xenu’s Link Sleuth and it’s a very useful, powerful and free tool.

This program checks all links on a site: “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, image maps, style sheets, scripts and Java Applets for broken links. It does the job quickly and then it shows some interesting reports of all the problems it has found on the site, sorted by different criteria, which allows us to locate the errors very easily.

Some additional capabilities are re-checking errors to ensure that they were not due to a temporary failure on an external site. It offers a report in an HTML page, which can also be sent by email. Support for SSL… It also allows, if the FTP access data is entered, to do a small check of what is inside to obtain data such as orphaned files, which are not called from any page.

All this in a program whose download does not exceed 300 KB and which is distributed free of charge. Quite a gift to avoid broken links.