Link of the Week: Free Online Broken Link Checker

14/1/2013

The best piece of professional advice I've had in 2013 is from my colleague Katharine O'Moore-Klopf in her recent blog entry The 1.5-Hour Daily Social Media Schedule, where she advocates regular link checking.

Katharine's advice to do this regularly is crucial if you have a website that has many links embedded – a blog or a resource centre, perhaps. Not keeping on top of link integrity can mean things get out of hand. The Proofreader's Parlour is a case in point. It's been live for a year and I've not run link-checking software on it. The result is that there are a staggering 239 broken links on the site.

This free online link checker will do the job: BrokenLinkCheck. Below is a summary of this tool's key features but there's a super article on the site that's worth a read, too.

Summary of features (as quoted on the BrokenLinkCheck website):

Can scan an unlimited number of web-pages: the free version has a 3000-page limit; however, there are no limits on the number of hyperlinks within those webpages
Validates both internal and external URLs
Shows location of problematic links in your HTML code
For bad URLs, reports HTTP response codes: 404 etc.
Can run on Mac OS X, iPad, Linux, UNIX, and Windows

I have my work cut out for me. I plan to mend 10 links a day until the Parlour is in perfect shape again. Then I'll run the checker once a week to prevent future overload. Don't make the same mistake I did!

4 Comments

Karin link

14/1/2013 05:00:52 pm

Many thanks for this! I just ran it for my blog, and fixed the twenty or so broken links.

Cheers ;-) Karin (Canberra, Australia)

Mary Sheridan link

15/1/2013 05:59:04 am

Many thanks for this useful link. Katharine's post had also spurred me into action, I was about to go hunting link checkers but your post has saved me some time.

Alicia Jay link

15/1/2013 09:13:22 pm

Thank you so much for sharing this resource! This came at a good time as someone was reviewing my site the other day and told me they came across two broken links. Not checking on our links could be costing us money! If someone can't get through to what they want then they are very likely to just move on. Thanks again, Louise!

Arlene Prunkl link

5/11/2013 12:09:41 am

Louise, I continue to find amazing stuff on your website! I ran this program on my brand new website, on which I thought I'd checked all the links, and BrokenLinkCheck found 11 broken links! Thanks so much for this resource. I'll continue to use it regularly.