Find and remove broken links from your website with Xenu's Link Sleuth

Have you ever experienced this: you arrive at a page from the search engine (or from another website) and find links pointing to other sites, but when you click on them, you find those pages don’t exist any more? This often happens with old articles and is annoying for the visitors. If you have a sizable website or blog with a large number of external links, keeping track of the status of these links can be almost an impossible task. But weeding out broken links from your site is necessary to make sure your site articles are still relevant and useful to your visitors.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is a tool that makes the task of hunting non-working links a piece of cake. This simple tool allows you to scan a website thoroughly in order to test every single link and check whether they all work correctly. You can customize the scan by setting filters, ignore URLs and also setting the number of maximum simultaneous threads.

During the scan, the program follows links to other pages, and checks the links on those pages too, so it is possible to check an entire site for broken links in one session. Apart from links, Xenu scans images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and Java applets also.

While the scan is in progress, it displays a continuously updated list of URLs which can be sorted according to different criteria. After the scan is completed, the tool generates a detailed HTML report of the analysis. Be warned that the analysis can take a really long time.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth is an absolutely must have tool for any serious bloggers.