A broken links on your website may leave bad impression to the visitors and search engines. However there are free tools available to check broken links. These free tools can help you to identify such dead links so that you can fix it easily. Websites with broken links have a wrong impression on viewers. They don’t have the credibility they used to, and their SEO is compromised.
When online users encounter broken links on several occasions on a website, Google could degrade its search engine ranking. Website owners must try and avoid such unpleasant experiences.
Screaming Frog
This crawling tool lets webmasters crawl, evaluate, and audit the onsite SEO of a website fast. With this tool, they can export each vital onsite SEO element for building a set of SEO recommendations.
Features
- Finds a list of every broken link on a site. The webmaster can export them for fixing or send them to the developer.
- Finds every temporary and permanent redirect on their site and detect problematic redirect loops
- Users can see every canonical tag used across their website to ensure no mistakes regarding their use
- Users can view the title and Meta description tags for every page and recognize the duplicated ones
- An X-Robots-Tag directive that is misplaced can affect the SEO of a website. This tool reviews every Robots tag on a site and webmasters get all URLs that their Robots.txt file blocks.
Download: Click here
Google Webmaster
This tool is handy for website owners. It informs webmasters on the way that Google bot is networking with their website. It offers comprehensive information on broken links and popular keywords.
Features
- The tool shows if there is any broken link found on your website.
- The Fetch option of Google bot sees feature lets a website owner optimize their site for his niche.
- The Links feature tells webmasters who’re linking to them, the pages with the maximum links and their internal linking structure.
- Site owners can also see their sites’ internal link data. A page that has very few links indicates the need for updating of the internal linking structure.
- Owners can upload their sites’ XML sitemap for ensuring that Google crawls all pages on them
- This tool lets users analyze their robots.txt file and run tests for ensuring that the robots file does not block any useful content.
Download: Click here
Xenu Link Sleuth
It’s among the most used webmaster tools and finds broken links across a site for fixing them. Moreover, it is free and applies to large websites. Below, we are going to see some of its features.
Features
- A webmaster must find the images with the largest size and optimize them. This tool helps in this with its sort by “SIZE” feature
- This tool forms a report of the valid URLs. They include Plain URLs and linked titles that show the structure of the site.
- Those who run huge websites will know that there is a chance of losing track of some pages. Some essential pages may be buried so deep in a site’s that they can’t be found. The sort by “Level” feature helps.
Download: Click here
If you like this information then you also might like Free Sites to check duplicate content on your website.
Ahrefs Backlink Checker
It would be apt to describe the Ahref Backlink Checker as a powerhouse with the capacity for nearly all backlink research tasks. The tool is evolving and more and more useful features are being added.
Features
- A website with more quality followed back links is more trustworthy to Google. This tool offers webmasters a complete scenario of Followed against NoFollow links for a target
- Webmasters can evaluate anchor texts for seeing how your rivals enhance their backlink profiles. They can detect potential negative SEO attacks on their website
- The tool lets webmasters who notice suspicious backlink activity incorporate spammy links in a disavow file
Download: Click here
Sitechecker
The software is the product of Boosta. It has two mains features, namely, Website audit tool and Website crawler. The audit tool scans all pages on a site, and the crawler automates the crawling of a website. They ensure that a site stays on point. Although you must have to register an account to use this tool.
Features
- Canonical Link Check – Canonical link refers to a tag that prevents duplicate content problems by stating a web page’s “canonical” version for SEO.
- This tool lets website owners ensure that their site is set up appropriately.
- This tool helps webmasters make their website easily index able setting up a few things like the index tag and robots.txt file.
- The tool checks several things that aren’t SEO favorable. Some are an URL’s length, whether it’s broken, and that HTTPS redirects are functioning.
- The External Link checker lets website owners see their external links and their functions. They can ensure that the affiliate links are NoFollow.
- The internal link check shows links that have bad status codes. If these links aren’t “affiliate links” they must be addressed
Download: Click here
Conclusion
There are many more free and useful Broken Link Checker tools on offer. They work fast, are easy to install, and don’t cost anything. Webmasters can choose one that suits them the most.