Links that give a 404 error message need to be fixed links. Most of the time, it happens when the owners of a website change something or take a page down. These links are also called “dead links,” neither SEO nor the person who visits the page will benefit from them.
When broken links are on a website, it’s not suitable for the site, so you should fix them and point them to the correct URL.
What are Broken Links?
Broken Links are links or hyperlinks that lead to outside web pages that no longer live on the website. You will receive an error notice if you try to access any of those URLs. A website’s functionality and popularity are negatively affected by broken links.
How to Find Broken Links?
- Broken links are easy to figure out if,
- A website can only be reached at some times.
- The page is no longer relevant.
- It moves to a different name.
- It’s no longer there.
Why does the Problem of Broken Links Arise?
Broken links happen for a few reasons that are common to most of them.
These things are:
- Changes to the pages.
- When switched to a different ISP.
- Colleges and universities have gatherings that change over time.
- The link needs to be corrected.
- There are errors in grammar in the link.
How to Fix Broken Links?
The tools we talked about in this piece can be used to fix broken links. By using these tools, you’ll get more people to visit your site, and it will rank higher on Google. Websites with broken links can be fixed without losing any information.
Sources say that the websites of large companies like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft also have several broken links. The numbers below show how many big businesses there are.
We got these rough statistics about Large Enterprises from the URL mentioned above, and they show the estimated number of broken links we found.
In this piece, we talked about the tools that help SEO and allow users to find broken links on their websites and eliminate them. These are the most popular tools, and some are free.
Top Broken Link Checker Tools
#1) Sitechecker
Sitechecker: Getting a website’s technical health perfect is hard, but it’s a must.
Sitechecker is a website crawler that looks through your site for broken links and tells you how to fix them. You can look up the links leading to 404 error pages and fix them immediately. Since it is a web tool, any running system can use it. Also, any CMS can be used to crawl a site.
Features:
- It does a free scan of 300 websites.
- It gives a full report of the technical health of a website, including broken links, redirect chains, orphan links, and indexation mistakes.
- It does an SEO audit of the specific page (for free) and the whole website (for a monthly or annual fee).
- It shows content mistakes like broken meta tags and pages that need to be longer.
- It visualizes the website by linking to pages inside and outside.
- After crawling, it keeps an eye on the website and lets you know if any changes are made (paid option).
- It recommends services such as a backlink tracker and a term ranking checker. (Extra cost)
Cons:
- If you have a free subscription, you can’t export your info.
Website: Sitechecker
#2) Ranktracker
Rank Tracker’s Backlink Checker lets you look at your competitor’s website for broken links. You’ll know precisely what backlinks your rival uses, which will help you make content that gives you an edge over them.
Just type in any URL to find its domain rating, URL rating, amount of backlinks, and much more. So, you can judge the strength of each backlink on its own.
Features:
- All types of domains get an instant analysis of their backlinks.
- Save the best backlinks to a list of favorites
- Check out the new and old links
- Find out about Domain Rating and URL Rating
Cons:
- The paperwork could be better.
Website: Rank Tracker
#3) Semrush
Semrush is an excellent website backlink tool showing all the links to your domain. It gives you the tools to discover everything about your backlinks and those of your competitors.
Semrush can help check a website by doing a deep link study. This involves looking at the incoming links, anchor texts, and the external links of the websites that link to the website being checked. It also suggests geo-distribution assets like graphs, pie charts, and a world picture.
Features:
- Deep link research can be done with Semrush.
- It has ways to check the type of backlinks, which will tell you where your competitors’ do-follow links, important industry web sources, and websites that want to link to your content are coming from.
- It helps you find the answers with geo-distribution tools like graphs and pie charts.
- It has tools that let you see the unique IPs of the domains that link to you, how IPs are spread out by country, and so on.
Cons:
- Compared to other things, it is expensive.
Website: Semrush
#4) Link Assistant by SEO Powersuite
The Link Assistant program will give you many good ideas for making links. The software does almost all of the work of making links for you. Link Assistant will find good chances to build links, search the web for email addresses of people to contact, and send out automatic pitches.
The software also gives you the tools to determine if your effort to build links was successful. Link Assistant can also help you find websites in your area that may have a broken link.
Features:
- Get ideas for good links
- Automatic tracking of backlinks
- Custom reports from the link builder
- Send out custom email ads
- Find sites with failed links that are important.
Cons:
- The cost of the annual membership can be high.
Website: Link Assistant
#5) W3C Link Checker
When you use W3C Link Checker to look for broken links on your websites, it gives you options like “display only summary,” “hide redirects,” “check only documents,” “check only heading,” etc.
The results give the state of the link and a list of problems found when broken links were checked. This free bad link test is part of Quality Web Tool and W3C’s Validators.
Features:
- It checks for problems with all of the website’s links, connections, and linked things.
- The depth to which the tool can go can be limited.
- You can also download this tool and put it on your machine.
- It uses HTML and CSS to make sure that scanning works well.
Cons:
- This tool moves slowly.
- Error messages are often longer than they need to be.
Website: W3C Link Checker
#6) Online Broken Link Checker
Online Broken Link is a no-cost web-based tool for checking websites for broken links and for authorizing, locating, and keeping track of any improperly linked content. As many web pages as you like can be scanned at once.
This tool works with Windows, Mac OS, iOS, and Linux.
Features:
- It can explore numerous pages to discover both external and internal URLs.
- This tool indicates the location of incorrect links within the HTML code.
- Furthermore, it identifies issues related to Linkrot and evaluates various aspects of a website’s trustworthiness.
- Additionally, it is compatible with subdomains.
Cons:
- Not all of it is free.
- The free version only lets you print 3,000 pages at a time.
- How much of the tool you need will depend on your site.
Website: Online Link Checker
#7) Dead Link Checker
Dead Link Checker systematically reviews your website and finds all the broken links that make your website look bad.
It can make an HTML output for a quick look at the results and a link cache file to speed up multiple needs. Dead Link Checker can find dead links like “Page not found,” “Timeout,” “Server error,” and any other error that prevents a webpage from being shown.
Features:
- There are three ways to find out if a link is dead. These are Site Check, Multi Check, and Auto Check.
- It uses wildcards to select the URL keyword.
- It can stop and start at any time.
- It checks several links at the same time.
Cons:
- There are limits to how well the pages can be scanned.
- When a subdomain is moved, it is treated as a new website, so links on those domains won’t be checked.
Website: Dead Link Checker
#8) Dr. Link Check
Dr. Link Checker checks all links that go to another website, whether internal or external. It can also check if images, style sheets, and other items are linked to them.
It checks all HTML and CSS code records and scans your whole page. Dr. Link Checker’s link goes through several checks to ensure no threats could hurt your website.
Features:
- It checks a website for free to find 1000 links.
- It summarizes all the broken, internal, and external links.
- Several photos for each link.
- You can set up checks to run independently based on your needs.
Cons:
- You can only read a certain number of pages.
- It’s only a partial percent free.
- Even with the basic plan, you can only check 2,000 links per month.
Website: DrLinkCheck.com
#9) Xenu’s Link Sleuth
It’s a free and open-source tool designed to check websites for broken links. This tool immediately links to your website and begins crawling it. It boasts a user-friendly interface, making it easy to use. Simply paste the URL of the site you want to crawl, and it will begin searching for broken links. It checks various elements, including images, borders, plug-ins, backgrounds, style sheets, scripts, and Java applets, to ensure they don’t contain broken links. Additionally, you have the option to generate a report whenever you desire.
Features:
- It helps when there are brief problems with the network.
- It can run files that are smaller than 1 MB.
- It works with SSL sites and has a directory.
- Only some FTP, gopher, and mail URLs were tested.
Cons:
- It doesn’t work with a Windows 32 machine.
- Web Analyzer 2.0’s graphics features are missing.
- There are no reliable ways to scan gopher pages.
Website: Xenu’s Link Sleuth
#10) Integrity Link Checker
Integrity Checker is a free program for the Mac desktop.
Depending on your website’s size, this tool may take a long time to finish its report. It has many options for sorting the results, and the only way to check for broken links is to use the option on the report page.
Adding the failed links from the comment forms is a good idea. Integrity Plus and Scrutiny are two linked apps that can transfer data, verify it, handle multiple sites, make a sitemap, and check spelling.
Features:
- Large websites work perfectly, and they don’t slow down at all.
- It also looks for pictures that are broken.
- Check for links inside and outside the site.
- Reports are sent out in a.pdf file.
Cons:
- It’s only for Mac people.
- When the dead links are checked, it takes time to finish the report.
- Users do not get to use Integrity Plus Checker for free.
Website: Integrity Checker
Conclusion
This post discussed the Top Website Broken Link Checker tools you can buy. These are the most famous tools, and their features and prices can be made to fit the needs of the industry. The dead link checker tools are the fastest, easiest to set up, and free tools for users. You can use any tool that works best for you.