Xenu’s Link Sleuth™ is a free, downloadable program that checks your website (or any website) for broken links. It runs on Microsoft Windows 95 or later. It is not available for any other OS.
The program is quick and simple to use. Enter a URL you want to check, and it crawls the site, checking all the links. You also have the option to tell it to:
- Check external links;
- Expand the search by giving it additional URLs to consider as internal; and
- Restrict the search of external links by entering specific URLs to ignore.
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You can also click ‘More Options’ to change the crawl preferences and report formatting. It can:
- Treat redirections as errors (this allows you to see 302 redirects);
- Change the number of Parallel Threads running; and
- Ask for a password if needed.
Report options include:
- Broken links, ordered by links and/or by page;
- Redirected URLs;
- Valid text URLs; and
- Orphans files.
When Link Sleuth is finished, it produces a report based on your preferences.
You can save or export your report in several formats. One useful option is to export it to Microsoft Excel as a TAB separated file. As Tom Critchlow explains in Xenu’s Link Sleuth – More Than Just A Broken Links Finder, you can then manipulate the information to help you identify and fix SEO issues beyond broken links.
For example, you can:
- Check if any of your title tags are too long — Filter for HTML pages and then check the ‘Title’ column for anything more than 65 characters.
- Find missing alt text — This time, filter for image files and check the ‘Title’ column for blanks.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth™ is a useful addition to your SEO toolbox. Take it for a spin and see what on-site SEO issues it can help you discover.
