Check Your Website for Broken Links

By Peter Kent from Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, 5th Edition

Link checkers are always handy, whether you’re interested in optimizing your site for the search engines or not. After you’ve created a few pages, run a link check to make sure you didn’t make any mistakes in your links.

Again, many, many link checkers are available, including paid services, such as LinkAlarm, that will automatically check links on your site and send you a report. A little Windows program called Xenu's Link Sleuth is free, which is always nice! (The creator of Link Sleuth requests that if you like the program, support some of his favorite causes.)

This program is very quick — checking tens of thousands of links in a few minutes — and very easy to use. It produces a report, displayed in your web browser, showing the pages containing broken links. Click a link, and the page opens so you can take a look. You can use the program to check both internal and external links on your site.

Note also that your web design software package may include a built-in link checker.