Free Software Tool Finds Broken Links
I use Xenu Link Sleuth for checking the links on my employers website. Xenu Link Sleuth is a free small Windows program that crawls entire sites looking solely for broken links. I’ve been using it for many years and thought some of you might would like to know about this handy utility program. Did I mention that its free?
As you can see from the table below, 16,000 links would take while to check by hand. The scan of over 5,000 pages took just about 15 minutes due to network slowdowns when checking offsite addresses. The good news is that I only have about 200 problem links out of a possible 16,000 or about 98.8% of the links are good. I try to keep our site above 99% at all times.
| ok | 14586 URLs | 91.19% |
| user skip | 1065 URLs | 6.66% |
| skip type | 153 URLs | 0.96% |
| auth required | 3 URLs | 0.02% |
| not found | 74 URLs | 0.46% |
| timeout | 21 URLs | 0.13% |
| no such host | 65 URLs | 0.41% |
| no connection | 7 URLs | 0.04% |
| forbidden request | 5 URLs | 0.03% |
| no object data | 3 URLs | 0.02% |
| connection reset | 1 URLs | 0.01% |
| temporarily overloaded | 2 URLs | 0.01% |
| server error | 9 URLs | 0.06% |
| invalid response | 2 URLs | 0.01% |
| Total | 15996 URLs | 100.00% |
In addition to checking my own links, I have scanned other peoples sites with Xenu. In one case, I used the data against the site I was scanning. I used the statistics as part of my justification as to why my employer should receive a lucrative federal grant rather than renewing the grant with the previous grantee.
My wife thinks that Xenu is some sort of spybot for hacking Area 51 due to its grey alien icon on my desktop. Rather, Xenu is a great ‘one trick pony’ that takes up only 500k, doesn’t use the Registry, and is very, very good at what it does best.
Download Xenu Link Sleuth today. You’ll be glad you did. I know I am.
