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Dead-Links (or Dead-Links Checker) is an on-line free tool for webmasters that enables you to easily check you site for the so-called broken/dead links. You just need to put your web-site or blog page’s URL into the input-box on Dead-Links site, and then a very fast bot reads all the html source-code and checks it for any broken links. With the size of today’s web-sites, it can be quite difficult to keep a track of all the links on your web-site, therefore, it is clever to use a tool like that to occasionally check your web-site for such broken links.
This is especially useful since on the “Google AdSense Program Policies” page it says: “Your site must not contain broken links and must be launched, functioning, and easily navigable.” under the “Site Functionality” section.
How does it work? Once you have put your start URL the spider then visits your web-site, crawls it, and then follow all the links checking for their status. When it is finished with checking, you get a report showing all the bad links found (and not only those with “404” status, i.e. the pages that produce those annoying “page not found” errors), while additionally, the spider splits links into two separate categories: “internal ones” (links from the same host), and “external ones” (outgoing link to different domains), but note that the robot doesn’t check (i.e. it doesn’t recognizes them) the following kinds of links or redirections: links inside frames, links inside IFrames, links using javascript, links inside java applets, links inside Flash objects, links inside image maps, redirections using Meta-Refresh tag. The “robots.txt file” protocol is not yet implemented, but is planned for future. Anyway, this is a very straight-forward process, and depending on the size of your page, it may take up to 1 minute (and even more in case of a slow connection) to check all the links.
Also note that the spider has a limit of 25 pages per domain and 150 external documents with a maximum execution time of 15 minutes, but if the spider finds a link towards “dead-links.com” on your site, then the broken link checker will crawl your website even deeper. Namely. the page limit in the domains increases to 150 and the external urls to 500, also increases the execution time. Also, there is a link to two other similar services on the Dead-Links site; one is called “Reciprocal Link Checker”: http://www.recip-links.com (this one checks also the PR of the specified URL) and the other one: “HTTP headers inspector”: http://www.server-whois.com.
/NOTE: There are many another such tools that checks the given web-site for such bad links, but I didn’t want to create completely new “book-entry” just for that. One such tool is called (Bad) Link Checker, while here is a link to its page: http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm. Note however, that this particular link-checker only searches for “404”s (i.e. broken links), and doesn’t check at all links written in Flash or pages that use frames. While the other one is a W3C’s W3C Link Checker at this page: http://validator.w3.org/checklink.
