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
-
Links disappeared
Hi, I am a wedding photographer based in Liverpool. I have been trying to do my own SEO for the last 6 months. I have been hovering around the top of page two for the main search terms for the past few years. I used an SEO company before christmas who got a lot of spammy links which resulted in my site dropping to page 4 of the SERPS. With the help of this forum I managed to locate them and disavow those links, and have tried to do it myself. I have managed to gain a few "featured weddings" on national wedding blogs and wrote a few articles for another wedding blog and also some forum comments. I have also got a few links for example from a wedding band in exchange for some photographs. I have got onto page 1 about 4 times, the best result was at position 6 on page 1 but every time I have slowly dropped out again. I have methodically (once a month) checked for any of the spammy links and updated the disavow list. My competitors have at best old forum comments and the like and on checking their websites with open site explorer are not actively link building at all. I have just checked my Webmaster tools and google is only recognising 51 links. (none of my good wedding blog links are there) I have an external links csv from the 28th June with 602 links on it. I changed my website around May of this year but it is still on the same domain name www.dwliverpoolphotography.co.uk. Can anybody help? Best wishes. David.
Technical SEO | | WallerD0 -
Referencing links in Articles and Blogs
Hi I am wondering if the <sup>tag in html is picked up by google as a reference point?</sup> I.e when you put a superscript in word it puts a small number next to your sentence. Then you have a list of reference at the end of the blog/article does google recognise this?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Will links be counted?
We are considering a redesign of our website and one of the options we are considering is to come up with something along the lines of http://www.tesco.com/, with rotating top offers. The question I am wondering is whether or not the links (ie. the blue links on the left side of the main graphic) will be visible to the spiders, and if not, whether there is a way to code it so they are?
Technical SEO | | simonukss0 -
Google Disavow Tool
Some background: My rankings have been wildly fluctuating for the past few months for no apparent reason. When I inquired about this, many people said that even though I haven't received any penalty notice, I was probably affected by penguin. (http://moz.com/community/q/ranking-fluctuations) I recently did a link detox by LinkRemovalTools and it gave me a list of all my links, 2% were toxic and 51% were suspiscious. Should I simply disavow the 2%? There are many sites where is no contact info.
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Unnatural links in webmaster tools
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to my site.I download latest link from google webmaster tool and decided to remove links from last four months.I also got several links from directory sites and i want to remove the links, how to delete links from directory sites ? I f there is no way to delete directory link , please let me know other option to get rid of this issue.
Technical SEO | | Alick3000 -
How to defend against link cloaking
Hi, I own a website where recently a lot of backlinks have been going to my old domain that 301's to my new domain. During the past 2 months I have noticed a massive amount of links pointing to my old domain. When I go to look at the links and go to the page all I see is a search bar which to me this seems like link cloaking. I am not sure what I should do. Obviously I am not doing the link building and someone is targeting anchor specific keywords from multiple domains that all look the same. My question is should I report it myself in google webmaster tools before I get hit with a filter or penalty, or would this force them to penalize me. And if I do get caught up in a penalty I would not know how to fix this since I doubt the webmaster is linking to me out of the kindness of his heart. Any advice? Thanks
Technical SEO | | dreamfire0 -
Code problem and the impact on links
We have a specific URL naming convention for 'city landing pages': .com/Burbank-CA .com/Boston-MA etc. We use this naming convention almost exclisively as the URLs for links. Our website had a code breakdown and all those URLs within that naming convention led to an error message on the website. Will this impact our links?
Technical SEO | | Storitz0 -
Is this a good link?
Found a .gov link to my website www.kars4kids.org. The url it links to is http://www.nyc.gov/cgi-bin/exit.pl?url=http://www.kars4kids.org/ which does eventually redirect to kars4kids. Will search engines see this as a link?
Technical SEO | | Morris770