I once compared 3 useful broken link checking tools and today it’s time that I share another great one:
LinkExaminer is a nice little tool that checks all the site links and have quite a few features useful for SEOs (many thanks to Mike Wilton for sharing it with us) .
To launch the tool:
- Launch the application,
- Under the menu Scan choose ‘Set URL‘,
- Enter in your main URL,
- Under the same menu click ‘Start’.
The tool will start scanning the site and compiling the data into a number of columns:
- URL (The full URL of each page);
- HTTP Code (based on this info each row will have different background color: red
indicates an error, green means everything is fine, and the shades of grey
(dark to light) mean there were some problems with crawling the link); - HTTP Message (simply the human-readable version of the HTTP code);
- Internal (whether or not the link checker considers the link
internal or external to the site being scanned. What constitutes
internal links can be tweaked in the configuration); - Robots.txt content (whether or not a URL matches the criteria of a robots.txt
file. Depending on the configuration settings, these links may or may
not be examined); - NoFollow (whether or not a link contains the NoFollow attribute -
this tells the search engines not to index or assign any weight to the
link); - Dynamic (whether or not a link (or page) looks to be dynamically
generated. It’s also possible for a scripted page to be returning
static content to be considered dynamic); - Relative (whether or not a link was explicit, meaning it included
the full domain name, instead of just the path or a starting location
relative to where the user is on the site); - SEO (whether or not some basic SEO components are missing from
a page. Currently it checks to make sure that a page title, meta
keywords and meta description are all present – if they are not, then
it displays which are missing); - Title (this is either the text of the first link going into the page, or once
a page is harvested it becomes the title text from the page (if
available). - Depth (minimum number of links that need to be clicked on to get
to this particular page); - In (the number of inbound links pointing to this page);
- Out (the number of outbound links on the page. Depending on config
settings this may include duplicates); - Content Type (This displays the Content-Type header returned by the webserver);
- Page size (in K);
- Last Modified (marked as modified by the server);
- Link Type (what type of links are pointing to this page. For example,
if it was an image file, the link type might be CSS and IMG.) - Duration (time in seconds it took to get the page);
- Similarity (how similar this page is to other pages, if similarity is
turned on).
What’s more:
1. You can sort ALL the site pages by any columns (for example, to find least linked to pages, spot duplicate pages, etc);
2. You can export all the scan results in CSV (and then open in Excel for a huge number of sorting, searching and filtering options).
Note: the tool did have hard time scanning a huge site.
Hey Anne! I just wanted to let everyone know that it installs and runs perfect under Ubuntu Hardy+ with WINE.
I downloaded it and it looks cool, thanks for sharing. Broken links have so many negative effects that it may leave your online website reeling from its effects …
Excellent tool, my favorite by far so far. I found a bug in the export, but it’s still very good (especially for free!).
Downloaded the tool and ran it, i did have a few errors there and managed to sort them out within 10 minutes, without this tool i would never have noticed them! Thanks for that Ann, i will refer to this tool at least once a month on all sites, great find.
Hi Ann,
Thanks for the introduction of such great tool. Much easier to use then the Xenu tool.
j
Ann,
Happy to hear that you liked the tool. I was tipped off to it a few months back and have used it regularly during site audits ever since. I’ve only run into a few issues with it and all them seem to have stemmed from problems on the site directly and not the tool itself. Thanks for the mention!
Good stuff. I’ve got a lot of work to do… I like how it shows your meta-keywords. I see I need to add meta-keywords to my blogs tag pages
For free, wonderful, and very good if it were paid.
BB
This link checker caused an denial of service attack on my sites. Luckily I ran it on a Sunday night. Beware!!
Your evidence?
BB
The CSV export is not really helpful since it doesn’t state what pages those links are placed on. the html export would be better, but with a size of 250MB it’s simply too large for my browser to handle… i see the tool’s potential but can’t really use it in an easy way
My comment would be that Creating a website design that is appealing, while also search engine friendly, is one of the hardest parts about SEO web design. After discussing SEO strategy with a potential new client, the business owner gets cold feet. Considering today’s economic uncertainty, entering into a contract to pay for costly search engine optimization services can be a daunting commitment.
Lots of designers get rich by simply not bothering with SEO considerations at all. I’ve recently had to break the news to yet another enquirer that her Flash site, all one long, long movie, can’t be properly optimised and will remain largely invisible to the engines unless we break it down into individual shorts on separate pages, costing, well, rather a lot. Perhaps not surprisingly there are no audible or visible signs of contrition from the designer.
BB