Utility for finding broken links

SourChipmunk · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:12

Is there some kind of tool I can run against a website to find out if all the links are active? I was unable to find a link in the sticky. I can google for it, but I don't trust what I find out there and was hoping someone here has some practical experience with such an item. A web-based scanner would do nicely as well.

TIA!

Augmented · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:26

Watchfire's WebXACT can do that on a page-by-page basis. It's not specifically designed for that purpose though. The W3C offers a link-checking tool too.

roboffer · 8 Mar 2006 at 13:29

Would be pretty easy to put together something that did this actually, web request to get the page, regular expression to find any links, loop through them performing a web request and checking the status returned. Check each link to see if its already been queried, and check to see if its external to *** main site possibly?

Nice little project if someone is bored

SourChipmunk · 8 Mar 2006 at 14:08

Augmented said:
The W3C offers a link-checking tool too.

That worked quite nicely for the root. I'm trying it now with a level 3 recursion check. It looks like it's checking external sites as well by doing that, though. :eek:

This could take a few minutes.

edit: this is the coolest tool! Thanks, Augmented!

Update: had to abort. It was checking all the links in my forums and such. It's much easier to exclude recursion and just whack in a few additional pages to check. It helped out greatly, though!