There is no doubt that dead links are bad for your web
site and its reputation. And that is much more than just an annoyance for your
visitors. Search engines are known to punish web sites with lots of dead links
through the rating penalties. For example, Google is very clear in its demand
to the web site owners, the demand, articulated in Webmaster Guidelines: Check
for broken links and correct HTML.
Google consideration is simple and reasonable: if a site
is old and it has numerous broken links, it would be logical to conclude that
it has not been updated for a long time and that it should be downgraded as a
result.
Search engines (Google) take your efforts to keep your
site updated into consideration, but fixing your site has double effects, as it
not only improves your search rankings, but your conversion ratio.
Xenu's Link Sleuth is a handy freeware, which 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 continuously updated list of URLs which you can
sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.
Additional features:
·
Simple, no-frills user-interface
·
Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary
network errors)
·
Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
·
Executable file smaller than 1MB
·
Supports SSL websites ("https:// ")
·
Partial testing of ftp, gopher and mail URLs
·
Detects and reports redirected URLs
·
Site Map
Developer website: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
