Broken Inner Links - Tool Recommendations?
-
Do you have any recommendations for tools that scan an entire website and report broken inner links?
I run several UGC centered websites and broken inner links, and external, is an issue.
Being that these websites are several hundred thousand pages large, I am not really all that excited about running software on my desktop (xenu link sleuth for example). Any online solutions you could recommend would be great!
-
If it happens to be a wordpress site, there is a plugin called something like "Broken Link Checker." If I recall correctly, that checks internal and outbound links. Otherwise, not too sure.
-
Ideric, did any of these suggestions answer your questions, or have you been able to otherwise find a tool for this? I know others would find the information useful.
At a previous company, we had a custom-written solution to check external links, and made it check response headers until a 200 OK showed, or it got five levels deep. What we'd often find is that we'd have a 301 for an external link, and it'd go from non-www to www. Wouldn't necessarily worry about fixing that, but then later realized that from there, the www link was a 404, OR went to a 200 OK category landing page that said "we've reorganized our site, search here for that individual resource".
-
Well you've found the best solution right here at SEOmoz! Instead of wasting time learning new systems to find out if they'll work or not, just solve your problem. Sign with PRO Elite and you can crawl 100,000 pages.
-
I have used this in the past http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp - (Click on the image in the top right of the instructions) a free tool for site map generation that will show broken internal links in the process. I don't think it has any limits to it, although I have not tried it on a site as large as you are suggesting. Just ensure you are not logged into your site when you run it. Although Google webmaster tools is ok, you can't verify changes made very quickly.
-
I think Xenu is your best option here. The size of the site nearly cuts out the chance a web tool could handle it.
Just recently on a site review I had to run Xenu on a site with 160,000 pages. It only took 4 hours running at 30 threads to complete. Any modern PC should handle it fine.
-
WMT is alright, apart from the fact you can't force Google to crawl all your pages. I would doubt that even a majority of the pages were crawled and indexed by Google (though I don't know what the site is).
Plus, as you say, it only deals with internal links and 404s coming in.
Do you know what the upper limit is on how many crawl errors WMT will display?
-
I might be wrong, but I think Google WMT can accomplish this with ease. I'm looking at 1000 right now. Externally you'll probably have to use xenu =/
-
You might be out of luck on a site that size.
I think WebCEO can do this with their online version but to get 100,000 urls crawled I think it'll cost you a bomb (the sort of money that it'd be cheaper to buy a second PC to run Xenu, lol).
Anyway - http://www.webceo.com/ - I think it may also be possible to install the download version to a server and run it that way.
-
I use Google webmaster tools. Go to diagnostics, then crawl errors.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Dealing with broken internal links/404s. What's best practice?
I've just started working on a website that has generated lots (100s) of broken internal links. Essentially specific pages have been removed over time and nobody has been keeping an eye on what internal links might have been affected. Most of these are internal links that are embedded in content which hasn't been updated following the page's deletion. What's my best way to approach fixing these broken links? My plan is currently to redirect where appropriate (from a specific service page that doesn't exist to the overall service category maybe?) but there are lots of pages that don't have a similar or equivalent page. I presume I'll need to go through the content removing the links or replacing them where possible. My example is a specific staff member who no longer works there and is linked to from a category page, should i be redirecting from the old staff member and updating the anchor text, or just straight up replacing the whole thing to link to the right person? In most cases, these pages don't rank and I can't think of many that have any external websites linking to them. I'm over thinking all of this? Please help! 🙂
Technical SEO | | Adam_SEO_Learning0 -
Competitors link building surely link farming ? but no punishment?
Hi there added a competitors metrics to see what they were doing and to my amazement they seem to have 1000+ links surely this is link farming considering we stay in a very remote area. also why would he be rewarded for this not punished? imgur.com/18dUqNL 18dUqNL 18dUqNL
Technical SEO | | ShauniBROWN2 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Site links show spam
Hi folks, I'm working on a website that runs on WordPress and was not updated by the owner, this has resulted in a malware injection and now when you search the companies name in Google, the site links appear with words like Viagra, et al. I've seen this a number of times, so I went through the code and have removed all the malware. I presume I now have to wait for Google to recrawl the website and update the site links? Is there anything else I should be doing to speed up the process? Thank you 🙂
Technical SEO | | ChristopherM0 -
Drop down navigation and link juice
Hi! We are desperately needing to overhaul our site navigation setup, and we have so many categories that we think our site could really benefit from a drop down navigation similar to what these sites have: http://www.paychex.com/ http://www.bmc.com/ We've held off doing this type of navigation in the past because we were only seeing people use flash to create it and we knew that it wouldn't be good for link juice. But these two sites are using HTML and CSS - which seems like a much better style and good for SEO. Do you agree? We want to make the switch but are worried about losing linking power by nesting our navigation in 's and CSS styling.
Technical SEO | | sciway0 -
What's the best free tool for checking for broken links?
I'm trying to find the best tool to check for broken links on our site. We have over 11k pages and I'm looking for something fast and thorough! I've tried Xenu and LinkChecker. Any other ideas?
Technical SEO | | CIEEwebTeam0 -
Page that has no link is being crawled
http://www.povada.com/category/filters/metal:Silver/nstart/1/start/1.htm I have no idea how the above page was even found by google but it seems that it is being crawled and Im not sure where its being found from. Can anyone offer a solution?
Technical SEO | | 13375auc30 -
Should I have a 'more' button for links?
I have a website that has a page for each town. rather than listing all the towns with a link to each, I want to show only the most popular towns and have a 'more' button that shows all of them when you click it. I know that the search engine can always see the full list of links and even though the visitor can't this doesn't go against Google guidelines because there is no deception involved, the more button is quite clear. However, my colleague is concerned that this is 'making life hard' for the search engines and so the pages are less likely to be indexed. I disagree. Is he right to worry about this??
Technical SEO | | mascotmike0