Do you use any link-checking tools on your websites?

[MichaelCorfman]

It is easy to make mistakes coding web page links. And when you make mistakes both humans using your sites, and the authority of the page you were trying to link to are diminished. And, of course, sites are not static, so links that might have been fine at one time become bad links later if a page being linked to moves or is deleted.

Do you use any tools to find links that are outdated and need to be updated on your sites? If you do, share with us how you go about finding and updating links on your websites.

Michael

[MichaelCorfman]

Historically, for Casino City we've used Google's webmaster tools diagnostic reports regarding crawl errors as a major source of information about link errors on our sites. The problem is that the webmaster tools report what the Google spider sees, and the Google spider does not systematically check every page on a site, and also webmaster tools only reports links to pages on your site that are bad - not links to other sites.

More recently we've made heavy use of the screaming frog SEO tool to check our sites and find issues. We've found it to be really helpful on that front, and we've made quite a number of changes to our sites both to fix bugs it found and to make improvements that occurred to us after seeing the link structure of our sites laid out before us in detail.

Michael

[theGman]

We use the Xenu link tool - have not used the Screaming Frog but will check it out

Xenu we use specifically to find broken links and for nothing else

[felku]

Right now I use only the webmaster tool, but I'm new in this so I don't know about the tools than can be used.

[Vrindavan]

If the tool is free, i will try it.

[michael1981]

I always use this one - http://www.iwebtool.com/broken_link_checker

It seems to work pretty well. I sometimes check my error logs as well just to make sure.

[Zoorana]

I'm using a WP plugin called Broken Link Checker.

It's worked well for me and it's quite convenient as it shows up on the Dashboard if there's any broken links or redirects found. Plus you can edit the faulty links on the list itself rather than having to go to the very page to correct it.