Today I will be looking at some SEO tools that check the current page (internal and external) outbound links. This may be useful for:
- validating if all links of the page work correctly or point to a valid destination (Note: I do realize that Xenu is the best tool for this but, first, it checks links for the whole site and, second, it is so awesome that it will be reviewed in a separate post);
- spying on (the competitor’s) nofollow usage strategy;
- understanding the page prominent anchor text;
- finding page “hidden” links (hat tip to Kerry).
| Tool/ Checks for | Nofollow | Anchor text | Broken links | Header status code |
| Site Link Analyzer | yes | yes | no | no |
| Link Checker | no | no | yes | no |
| LinkValet | no | no | yes | no |
| LinkVendor | yes | yes | no | no |
| Link Evaluator (FireFox Extension) | no | no | yes | yes |
1. Site Link Analyzer by SEOChat (in reality checks for the page links, not site links) reports on both external and internal page links showing the following information for each one: link anchor text and link nofollow attribute (if it has one).
2. Link Checker (by RankQuest) validates the given page links and shows if the link is working (“ok”), if it’s broken (“not ok”) or if it’s “redirecting”.
3. LinkValet will show you the header status code of each linked page:
4. LinkVendor fetches link anchor text and “link info” (nofollow, image link):
5. Link Evaluator (or a similar one: LinkChecker) is a FireFox plugin that shows you the link status by color: green – OK, red – not working:
I like the firefox plugin :-)
@ Ann, I tried the Firefox plug-in and it says “link timed-out” for “Site Link Analyzer”. ?
The plugin works fine for me may be some firefox version probs or better retry it.
Even if you do validate your links, and make sure you are exchanging with well coded related web site it’s still no guarantee that you will get credit for the link. Frustrating as that is it is the reality.
With that being said we still need to have tools that help us monitor the links we work so hard establishing. Perhaps one day ALL of our back links will be counted!
Joost de Valk’s SEO Link Analysis Firefox Extension should also come in handy. This works great with Yahoo site explorer and Google Webmaster tool, and shows us the anchor text and no follow details. here is the link.
http://yoast.com/seo-tools/link-analysis/
Michael VanDeMar’s Bad Neighborhood tool is another one that comes in handy when checking outbounds. It scans the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flags possible problem areas. I like it and use it frequently:
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
First, to the commenter Debra, thanks for the link to bad-neighborhood.com. Awesome – great suggestion.
Second, Ann your articles are always great. These are some good tools for sure – I like Xenu’s Link Sleuth too (another suggestion you made a few weeks ago). http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
All these checking programs miss 2 important problems:
1. Dumb web designers that use an HTML refresh or worse a javascript redirect to a new domain
2. Dead domains that are now an adsense site – typically with the domain in the title.
I finally wrote a perl script looking for these.
I’ll be using your tools on my site.
Thanks, for sharing awesome information regarding link checker tools. Till now I was just using the link checker fire fox extension before submitting link to a page ,now I will try your mentioned tools.
Seo Quake Firefox extension also provide external and internal links info about the page along with no follow tag. It is handy to use tool as it is placed on status bar and give other info related to seo.
Well RankQuest.com will provide all the details, so why go any where else.
I’m having problems with link vendor. Is anyone else?