Is there a broken-URL finder application that I could use to scan a website for broken links? (A Mac application would be better.)
5 Answers
For Windows users: Xenu
For *nix/Mac: wget (usually installed by default)
Update: Typical wget
usage:
wget -r --spider -b -o /var/tmp/wget.log http://target.site.com/
-r
- Recursive download--spider
- Check downloaded content for new links, then discard-b
- Run in the background-o /var/tmp/wget.log
- Target log filehttp://target.site.com/
- Replace with the site you want to check
wget will create a log file detailing the status codes reported while downloading content from the target site - note that this method will catch links to nonexistent content from within the domain, however, off-site links will not be checked (which is why it pays to monitor your site's error logs).
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3Xenu is the most simplest and most useful tool that you can find for Win. I think that it also works under Wine for Linux. Sep 23, 2010 at 7:22
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Google Webmaster tools will report on broken links. It's a simple tool, free to install to a website.....and platform agnostic. If you're not already using it, it can help you boost your SEO and useability as well.
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Agree, but it can detect broken links only some time after you publish the site; by then some people will have already clicked on them and been disappointed.– ErionSep 23, 2010 at 8:16
This recursive HTML validator: http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
should show you broken links among other errors. The tool can also be installed locally.
You could also try A1 Website Analyzer (Windows tool, but can run in VMWare/Fusion under Mac) It can tell you of all URL references site-wide (e.g. which pages link to a 404 URL + usually also line numbers), HTML/CSS errors etc.
The W3C Link Checker is one of the oldest online services that checks for broken links.