Detecting Broken Links using Xenu Link Sleuth

Referred URL
http://sixrevisions.com/website-management/find-remove-broken-links/

Another excellent tool I like using for hunting down broken links in my websites is Xenu Link Sleuth. You can download it here.

Unlike the WordPress plugins mentioned earlier in this article, Xenu is a standalone desktop application for Windows that outputs all your site links—whether they’re valid or invalid links—and groups them into a very readable fashion.




After you install Xenu, using it is really easy.
1 Click on File and select Check URL.
2 Type your website’s URL (e.g. http://www.sixrevisions.com/).
3 Wait for all links (site wide!) to be checked.
4 When Xenu asks whether you want a report, click on Yes.

You can enter your FTP server details, but I simply click on Cancel and Xenu generates an XHTML report locally (it opens a dialog window automatically).
In the generated report, click on Broken links. Sort it by link in the table of contents to see all the pages that have broken links in them (and the broken links of course).
Finally, once you’ve detected all broken links, what is left to do is to navigate to the posts and pages containing references to broken links. You should either fix or remove those links.