Working at Home on the Internet

Review of Xenu, a Broken Link Finding Tool

No, that’s not a picture of my Space Alien, that is a picture of Xenu. He’ll crawl around your Website or Blog to find all the Bad Ole Broken links.

I was reading a review on Smiley Cat of Inspyder, InSite which is a paid (around $49) program to catch broken links and misspellings on individual websites. He seems to like the program quite a bit and recommends it pretty highly.

Towards the end of the post he mentions a Free program with similar but more limited features. I have been looking for an easier way to check for broken links, doing it manually takes way too much time. So, me being me I had to check it out. I downloaded Xenu’s Link Sleuth unzipped the file and opened the program.

This is a no frills program that functions quite well for it’s intended purpose, Finding Broken Links. The first thing it does when started is to list ALL of your links, internal and external showing the status (Ok, Forbidden, precondition etc) and whether it is text/html or image/jpeg to make it easier to find the location of the broken link.

Once the list is complete you can generate a report on everything found. This is a list of the Table of Contents.

Each table is broken down to show you the broken link, the error code and each post/page on which it appears. From there you simply click the page, find the link and deal with it (make sure you are already signed into your Blog/Webpage account).

I haven’t gotten any further in the table than dealing with broken links yet, with 6000 links that could take some time. So, I will do another Full Review once I have finished clearing out the broken links.

One thing to remember for those to whom you are linking… If they change their URL format, it will show as a broken link. ie. site/date/p=111 to site/date/post title will not work, it will be a broken link.

FYI… This is NOT a paid review.

I almost forgot, this is only for Microsoft Windows users. The author has no plans to adapt for MAC, Linux or any other OS. Sorry.

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July 5th, 2007 at 01:09pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Reviews, Websites | reader remarks | Print This Post