Does your blog or webpage have valid links?

Do you have a long blog roll? Have you checked the links recently? Do you have web page with many scrapbooking links? Have you checked those links recently? Web users really don’t clicking on a link and it is broken or not working. It happens but if you take a few minutes, you can reduce or eliminate the bad links on your blog or website.

It takes a long time to click on each one and see if they are valid. That is a waste of time. There are tools out there to check for bad links. There are free tools and tools you can buy. I am going to mention the free online web tools that I found and like.

The link checkers are easy to use and quick. Since they are free, they do have their quirks/issues.

W3CLink Checker

The first one I like is W3C Link Checker

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check
3. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 – 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.
4. Click on the results or just scroll to the bottom for the results. It will tell you which links you should check:

Some notes on using W3C Link checker:

Robot Exclusions: If the error comes back that the link is not checked because of robot exclusion roles, it means that site isn’t allowing computer generated checks. Those links are probably fine. In my example, I got this rule for my google stats and I know it is valid. If you don’t know, check them by hand (copy and paste url into browser to see where you go.)

Redirects: You can either leave them as is or change your web page to reflect the new place. The web owner was nice enough to say, this page no longer exists and has been moved to here.

Lastly, sometimes this tool doesn’t give results and just appears to hang. (Hey, its free you can’t complain much.) Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the last link it was checking. The tool seems to hang periodically when it can’t find certain types of pages on a valid host and the host doesn’t return an error or takes a long time to return an error. Check the last link by hand and it probably isn’t valid, update or delete the link on your blog/webpage and rerun the tool.

Link Valet

Link Valet is a tool that runs too quickly and gives a few false errors. What I liked about this tool it would check multiple pages, results are easy to scroll through and doesn’t hang.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. For recursion depth, check 0 if you only want it to do that page, check 1 and it will check that page and links on the pages that it links to. Checking 2 will probably take a long time.
3. Click OK
4. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 – 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.

Once you get results, scroll through looking for Red squares. Those are the ones that you need to check. Also, you will notice that some have timeouts. This will happen for slower sites. It’s those false errors and you can check those links by hand.

AnyBrowser Link Checker

The last one is quick tool that is incredibly easy to run. AnyBrowser Link checker What I didn’t like about it, is I have to scroll through the results and find the bad ones by hand (no colors to highlight the bad ones.) It also only tells me OK or BAD and no reason.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check Page

Search through the list for BAD and check those links.

See how easy that was to check for dead/bad links? Once you know that these tools exist, where they are, how to run them, and what the results mean it doesn’t take long to check your blog/webpages periodically. The web is always changing and those links change too.

I listed three tools because everyone has their preferences. I like W3C link checker because it gives a lot of information. Link Valet is quick, with nice results, but some false timeouts. And my least favorite, AnyBrowser Link Check, because it only says OK or BAD and you have to look through the results. Try out one or all of these tools to clean up your blog roll or web pages.

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