Earlier this month I wrote about Google’s Broken Link Filter and how important it is to make sure all the links on your website work. For internal links I recommended using the GSiteCrawler program and asked my blog readers to suggest a tool to check a site’s external links as I have not yet found a good option to use.
Enter blog reader Dan Chase who recommended trying out Xenu’s link Sleuth. I downloaded it last night and began running a report on my website to see how it works.
The Pros:
- The program is a free download that is easy to install and straightforward to use
- It crawls a website extremely quickly and will find all the links (internal and external) that you are listing
- It validates the links to make sure they exist and gives you a fairly easy to understand report on what is broken
- Unlike the Google Sitemaps tool it not only tells you which links are broken but also tells you on which page the broken link is listed so you can fix the problem
- It found a number of broken external links on my site (including to one of my sponsors – yikes!) that I am now able to fix
The Cons:
- Because the program works so quickly it seems to have trouble accessing pages that do exist on my site. As a result it tells me in the report that I have many internal broken links when they are actually fine
- Note: My case is not the typical one as I have almost 20,000 pages of content on my site that the program has to sift through. Because the program includes internal links it will have to analyze around 500,000 or so links!
- There is an option to only test your internal links but, as far as I can tell, no option to only test your external links (which is what I am looking for) so you end up having to test both your internal and external links
Overall:
- It is a easy to use, valuable tool to test your internal and external links
- My preference for internal links remains to be GSiteCrawler program as I find it much more reliable
- I will likely continue to use Xenu until I can find a tool that gives the option to show only external broken links and can handle the size of my website
Thanks for the suggestion Dan!
Evan Carmichael
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Did you notice the ‘retry broken links’ option in the file menu? It allows you to recheck the links that it considered broken due to response time.
Regarding checking external links only, it would only be possible with file system access to all your files. ‘Crawling’ a site is dependent on links between pages to get to them, so it is dependent on the internal links, to find the external ones. Of course supplying a separate report should be easy enough.
You can achieve that with Xenu, though not in the html report… in the application, after it completes, you can click on the column headings to sort. Then you can scroll past your own and check the externals. You have to right-click and check the properties to find where it was linked from… One other option is to export the file and process in a spreadsheet or other database program. I admit these options aren’t as convenient as having it built-in to the primary report, but it’s a start if you need it.