Comments on: 3 Broken Link Checkers Reviewed and Compared

By: Xenu

Xenu — Sun, 09 May 2010 18:13:33 +0000

To Ann:
The problem with getting stuck in huge sites is related to the sitemap. Since version 1.3 (20.12.2008), Xenu has an abort box there. (Of course you can also disable the sitemap) Obviously, a 100000 URL site would have a huge sitemap.

To Jaamit:
Contact me if you think you can reproduce this (send me a .XEN file that is shortly before it crashes)… Xenu should definitvely not crash the whole system, because it doesn't do any low level stuff.

By: Xenu

Xenu — Sun, 09 May 2010 13:13:33 +0000

By: BG Mahesh

BG Mahesh — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:34:48 +0000

Linkscan from Elsop.com too is a good one

By: Matthew Egan

Matthew Egan — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 04:25:48 +0000

Yea, more than the main three should be reviewed here, as well as some actual review standards. What do we, as optimizers, need from these sites? Does the site provide this? What does one do that that others should? Etc?

By: Sattarmalik

Sattarmalik — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:35:36 +0000

Thanks Mike Wilton for providing link I will check it

By: Charles Boyung

Charles Boyung — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:26:29 +0000

The SEO plugin for IIS 7 that was released to beta a few months ago searches for broken links for you among several other things. You need to have IIS 7 obviously, but it works on any site, not just those hosted on your IIS server. You just give it the URL and how many links to crawl, and it goes at it. It isn’t quick, but the report appears to work with any sized site and is free if you have IIS. You can export the report to a CSV which you can then work with in Excel as well.

By: Mike Wilton

Mike Wilton — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:30:56 +0000

D’oh! Completely forgot to leave a link: http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/Network/lnkexam/Freeware.htm

By: Mike Wilton

Mike Wilton — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:29:29 +0000

I’ve recently started using Link Examiner. It’s a pretty solid little tool with some really cool features. In the past I would use Xenu regularly or just use Google Webmaster Tools for crawl errors.

The nice thing about Link Examiner is that it shows you error codes, gives you some SEO info (Is it missing titles, descriptions, etc.). What I like most about it is that it lets you right click on a link and you have the options to open it in a browser, copy it to your clipboard, view a list of all pages that link to the page reporting an error, etc. And if you need to provide the data to someone else, like a web designer or your boss, whoever it also has a nice little reporting feature which let’s you export the list of links to text, CSV, and HTML files.

It’s a nice little tool if you are looking for something that is free and reliable.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 09:33:51 +0000

Nice reviews. I use webmaster tools and xenu regularly to check for broken links. Xenu is also good for analyzing broken links of authority sites, for link building purposes, then send a friendly email to the authority site mentioning their broken link(s) and ‘subtly’ suggest an alternative (i.e. my link) to use.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:17:22 +0000

Using google webmaster tools to check my links for me. So much better than anything on your list. Nice list anyhow though. Webmaster tools gives you all the 404 and all the pages linking to those 404 so you can fix them or contact them if they’re external. Couldn’t be easier.