Dead links or broken links can be detrimental to your site’s reputation, Google bots detest it, and so does your blog users. Imagine a situation whereby someone decides to find information on your website and he/she will be presented with 404 error!. I guess that is another dead link and trust me, it is quite annoying. When you have soo many broken link on your website, you’re probably giving your blog readers the impression that you’re not capable of handling petty links and this will have a negative​ impact on your website ranking. If you’ve a lot of articles published on your website, then you’re likely to face dead links and it’s your duty to find and fix them all. Broken links affect a blog’s SEO badly, so you’d always keep your website fresh at all times.
Finding broken links on your website can be quite a tedious task, especially when you are using the manual method. Dead links occurs whenever you draft or delete a post, and if you had previously made interlinks on some of your older articles, fixing those broken links manually can consume a lot of time. From time immemorial, it has never been easy to find and fix broken links, but i have found some of the best online tools that can conveniently detect dead hyperlinks and it’ll make it easier for you to fix them. Without further ado, here’s how to find and fix all the broken links on your websites to enable you get rid of 404 error.
1. Broken Link Check
Broken Link Check is one of the best free online tools that allows you to check your websites for bad URL. This tool is geared towards helping you to locate problematic links that can cause 404 errors and it goes further to show you where exactly the bad URL is located in your posts and html. This makes it easier to fix or remove all broken links on your website. Broken link check is actually my most favourite tool, it’s quite reliable, fast and accurate coupled with the fact that it shows only the hyperlinks that’s really broken.
Getting started with broken link check is perhaps too simple, as all you need to do is head over to the website, then enter your blog url and hit the find broken links button. From here, enter the security code that will be showned, then broken link checker will automatically search all the webpages on your websites and report broken links. You will be able to fix all the links from there, as the tool shows you the dead link’s location in your HTML source. Overall, broken link check is convenient and it doesn’t require any form of registration.
2. Dead Link Checker
Dead Link Checker is another popular tool that can be used to detect broken links on your​ website. This tool is aimed towards crawling all the webpages on your website and identifying broken links for you to fix. To begin with, head over to the dead link website and enter you blog url. Now choose whether you want your whole website or a single webpage to be crawled, then tap the ‘check’ button and input the security code.
Dead Link checker will automatically crawl your webpage and report all the bad URLs. It’s quite easy to use, and it also brings a ton of advance features. One is the ‘Multi Check’ feature, which enables you to crawl multiple websites in one go, and the report will be sent to you via email. Auto Check is another smart feature dead link checker brings to its abode. The service automatically allow dead link checker to crawl your webpage page on regular basis for dead links and the report will be mailed to you.
3. Dr. Link Check
Dr. Link Check believes that broken link can make a website look unprofessional and deter visitors from retuning to your blog. So with his online tool, you can easily detect most of the bad links on your website and be able to fix them. To get this one going, head over to Drlinkweb.com and provide your website URL at the given box. Hit the “Start” button and the tool wilauto crawl through your website’s​ pages and present a report of all the broken links it can find.
While Dr. Link Check seems to be quite an awesome tool for checking broken links, it’s only limited to crawl a maximum of 1,000 links. Once it reaches the limit, the crawling will stop automatically and you’ll be asked to pay $10 in other to check up to 3,000 plus links. So i recommend Dr link check to those who have small blogs. If perhaps your blog contains alot of links, then you can try other available alternatives.
4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best tools you can use to check for broken links on your website. The software comes in two different versions, (free and paid) and it can give accurate reports of all the bad URLs on your blog. The SEO spider lite allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, but you can upgrade to enjoy unlimited checkings. To begin with, head over to screamingfrom and download SEO spider.
When you open the seo spider software, you will be greeted with a familiar interface. So all you’ll need to do is type your website url in the spider box, then hit the “Start’ button. SEO spider will automatically crawl all the links on your website pages and present to you all the 404 broken links. Also using SEO spider, you can view the source of the dead links when you click on the “inlinks” tab. This makes it easier to locate and fix those broken links without stress.
5. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is one of the old but yet reliable software that you can use to check websites for broken links. The app verifies link on normal style sheets and it displays a frequently updated list of URL that you can sort by different criteria. Xenu’s Link Sleuth brings a simple user interface, and it can re-check broken links when you’ve a network error. So to get this one over and done with, head over to xenu’s link sleuth website and download the software on your PC. Launch the tool, enter your site URL and wait till it automatically crawl your webpage for broken links. Overall xenu’s link sleuth does a great job when it comes to finding broken links on your website.
Final Words
There are a lot of online tools you can use to check your website’s broken links, we’ve the broken links checker plugin which you can use on your WordPress blog, and also the Google webmaster tool can do a pretty cool job when it comes to detecting dead links. So we’ve listed the best free tool that can be used to check for internal and external broken links on your website. Always keep your website fresh!.