Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a sub-directory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. It is almost inevitable that over time some of your web pages will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your users to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but think about the situation when your website is having more than few hundreds of web pages.

I have compiled a list of 5 best free broken link checker tools which will help you in finding broken links (dead links) as simple as clicking few options. This list is not prioritized; it is up to you and your usage that which tool suits you best.

1. Xenu’s Link Sleuth^(TM)

Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continuously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time. It is offline windows based software.

Additional features:

• Simple, no-frills user-interface
• Can re-check broken links (useful for temporary network errors)
• Simple report format, can also be e-mailed
• Executable file smaller than 1MB
• Supports SSL websites (“https:// “)
• Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites
• Detects and reports redirected URLs
• Site Map

Download | ver: 1.3c released on April 25th, 2009 | OS: MS Windows

More Info : Xenu’s Website

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2. LinkChecker

LinkChecker is available in three different interface:  Commandline interface, GUI client and Web interface. Features:

• Recursive and multithreaded checking
• output in colored or normal text, HTML, SQL, CSV, XML or a sitemap graph in different formats
• HTTP/1.1, HTTPS, FTP, mailto:, news:, nntp:, Telnet and local file links support
• restriction of link checking with regular expression filters for URLs
• proxy support
• username/password authorization for HTTP and FTP and Telnet
• honors robots.txt exclusion protocol
• Cookie support
• HTML and CSS syntax check
• Antivirus check
• 3 different interface:
  1. a command line interface
  2. a GUI client interface ,
  3. a (Fast)CGI web interface (requires HTTP server)

Download | ver: 5.1 released on 04.08.2009 | OS: MS Windows

More Info : LinkChecker’s Website

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3. Broken Link Checker – (WordPress Plug-in)

This plug-in will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found. Once installed, the plugin will begin parsing your posts, bookmarks (AKA blogroll), etc and looking for links. Depending on the size of your site this can take a few minutes or even several hours. When parsing is complete the plugin will start checking each link to see if it works. Again, how long this takes depends on how big your site is and how many links there are. You can monitor the progress and set various link checking options in Settings -> Link Checker.

Features:

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, the blogroll, and custom fields (optional).
• Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
• Notifies you on the Dashboard if any are found.
• Also detects redirected links.
• Makes broken links display differently in posts (optional).
• Link checking intervals can be configured.
• New/modified posts are checked ASAP.
• You view broken links, redirects, and a complete list of links used on your site, in the Tools -> Broken Links tab.
• Each link can be edited or unlinked directly via the plugin’s page, without manually editing each post.

Download and More Info

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4. W3C Link Checker – (Online)

W3C Link Checker looks for issues in links, anchors and referenced objects in a Web page, or recursively on a whole Web site. Just provide URL of your website and it will look for the issues and present you the summary report. You can provide link depth to check links recursively.

Give it a try here : http://validator.w3.org/checklink

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5. Dead-Links.com – Free Broken Link Checker – (Online)

Like W3C, it crawls your website by providing website URL. It presents report with total links found on each page crawled. You cant provide the link depth, it crawls and checks each page.

Give it a try here : http://validator.w3.org/checklink

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Do you came across with other tools? Please share with us in comments.