Nothing turns me off more than seeing dead links on a site or missing images. To me dead links are almost worse than small typos.
When you link to other sites, you have no control over how the owners of those sites will manage their content and checking all your links manually is not feasible or practical either, particularly once your site has hundreds of blog posts.
The solution is to use link checking utilities to scan and report on every broken link on your site.
Link Checking Tools
If you Google “Link Checking Tools” or “Link Checker” you’ll find several free online utilities. I have tried a few and so far the one I liked most was AnyBrowser’s Linkchecker.
On one test AnyBrowser’s only reported 1 false positive out of 156 links. Not bad.
Fixing Dead Links
- If your link points to a web page that no longer exists then you can either delete it or replace it with a similar page (be sure to update the surrounding text around the link).
- If you wrote a review post about a product or a site that no longer exists then you may just want to delete the post or delete the link and add note explaining why the link has been removed.
Searching and replacing dead links once in a while is a good way to prevent your site from looking outdated and unkept.
22 May 2009 at 1:19 am
Just what I needed! This takes the tedious task of manually checking each page for deadlinks out of your hands. Thanks for the info and site recommendation, it will definitely save me some time!